~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Daniel Galef

Self-Portrait as Barbie/Oppenheimer (or Vice-Versa)

I’m driving through the desert in a car

so pink it’s glowing, through a field of holes

in salmon sandstone, dug by giant moles

with hot-pink noses shaped just like a star

or frozen blast. The world is wounded—scarred—

the colors of the sunset, burning pink,

are getting just so bright it’s hard to think. . .

as hard as math! As hard as plastic. Hard.

The twentieth century is the time of monsters,

of mushrooms, atoms, acid, smoke, and plastic,

of ends so ugly any means are drastic,

of questions big enough to make up answers,

or make up rhymes, or make up our whole lives.

Be any thing: a doctor, model, prince,

or god. My car’s a speeding rocket (since

the truth’s too slow to catch us as it drives

past billboard lies: a fifty-foot martini

and jingles screaming formulae and warnings

and man-made sun, and nights that know no mornings

and look, that's me (a bombshell in Bikini!—

To be an object is to shed the past,

to let a hand from heaven choose your mission.

It’s death, just partly. Split your soul, like fission

to stay alive. But isn’t life a blast?

Daniel Galef’s first book, Imaginary Sonnets, is a collection of persona poems all from the point of view of different historical figures, mythological characters, and inanimate objects, including Wernher von Braun, Lucrezia Borgia, and a breakfast taco. His flash fiction, narrated by J. Robert Oppenheimer, was published in Juked and the 2020 Best Small Fictions anthology.