The phenomenon [nuclear war] is fabulously textual also to the extent that,
for the moment, a nuclear war has not taken place: one can only talk and write about it.
—Jacques Derrida

Danced out and sweaty, with club-stamped hands
and whiskey-wobbled ankles, we four women
direct the cab to The Jackhammer, a 4 am leather bar
where we can take our tops off and be in love
with our flesh that keeps being good to us,
keeps covering our meat and bones, keeps
glistening beneath bar lights. Shirts off
or leather, the bouncer says. I consider my boots,
my motorcycle jacket, the animals
I am wearing—but the point is
to be fabulously bold in our vices for a night.
We huddle shyly like a small herd of caribou,
a full spectrum of breast sizes
in a room full of men with assless chaps
and furry chests. A man says, It’s fabulous
to see women down here; he says our breasts
are fabulous and motorboats M’s,
which are the most voluptuous and tempting
in their otherness. In another bar,
I might have slapped him. Here,
in this gaudy light, I want
to kiss his forehead and say
bless you. Here, the prevalence
of pain is made public. Men line up
to be tied to a wooden apparatus,
limbs splayed open and secured
to prevent flailing when the whip
slices their backs. Here, we call pain
pleasurable, as if an apocalypse
can be sequined with joy—
as if it’s okay to marvel at the beautiful
cloud of the atom bomb in photos,
at a hell we cannot know until
it owns us. I wonder
what could be made of my skin
by a disease that lurks in both loved
and unloved bodies: human disaster.
There is something ugly in this
worry, in having it here, some remnants
of GRID and Ronald Reagan. Here is a prayer
in praise of the groaning in the backroom:
Let each body be loved until its end.