Happy 4th of July from the Planetary Broadcast Network! This week in your favorite alternate-1950s podcast: the mysterious disappearance of the USS Nebrahoma, the release of the world’s first flying car, a PSA from the National Department of Robotics, transparent bubble skirts on the runway, and more. Also, can you decipher Fission Girl’s coded message to her young Fission Rangers? It might help you win at “Wavy Navy,” the game tie-in coming in September!
With each step I emerge
From the ghost of myself;
Past seconds collapse,
The shed skins of snakes.
You can’t take anything with you.
No,
Not even that.
The sea’s surface is miles above—
So drown,
Or drop every ounce
And follow the silver bubbles rising.
“I would do it legally, through the proper channels,” he said, sipping his coffee.
And I said, No you wouldn’t—
At least, I know I wouldn’t—
But I’m a mother, so maybe it’s different.
“What do you mean?”
I mean that in Syria, and Somalia, and Venezuela,
There is a woman my exact age
Who has a son just like mine (maybe he’s robot-crazy too)
Only I get to watch my son grow taller
And she gets to watch her son grow thinner.
Thinner, and sicker, and thinner and sicker every single day,
Wasting away into nothing
While she waits for approval like a good girl.
When the great news finally comes
He’s already gone,
So she crosses the border like a dead person
Leaving her soul in a small coffin.
There was no point to any of it, after all.
There’s a mother
Cradling her sleeping baby in one hand
Filling out forms with the other.
She knows she will be rejected (again)
But she keeps writing,
Because every day is a game of Russian Roulette
And the barrel is between her daughter’s eyes.
Click, click, bang—a bomb
Click, click, bang—a bullet
Click, click, bang—the water is gone
What sort of mother
Wouldn’t throw herself in front of the gun.
Take me instead! Kill me!
I would die a thousand times for my child
If that’s what it took;
I would build a bridge out of my own corpses
If it would carry my daughter to freedom.
Do you think I care about your approval?
That I give two shits about your laws?
By all means, glue that camera
To the deluded young men
Parading around with rifles.
Let’s keep up the masturbatory war games,
The paper-thin heroism,
The endless circle-jerk of violence.
So brave, all of you, so brave.
Don’t pan across the mothers
Crouching over corpses.
Black, white, brown, it doesn’t matter how old the dead are,
The mothers all wail as one:
My baby, my baby, my baby.
1,000 diaper changes
1,000 sleepless nights
Books read
Songs sung
School uniforms washed
Manners taught
Hugs and kisses
And so, so much hope—
Gone in a solitary second,
Wiped out in a long blood smear.
Every broken body you see was the cumulation
Of years of hard work,
Patience, and caring.
Every. Single. One.
But let’s pretend they’re cardboard targets—
Then we don’t have to think about what we’ve done.
You keep banging on about the rules, but take a minute:
Imagine what you’d really do.
Meanwhile,
I’ll ask to be excused.
I’m going to sit with the mothers
To cry
As they stack our hearts into piles
And burn them outside the city.
–R.C.
