NIKE MISSILE BASE
After Sputnik, after Khrushchev
after Sing Sing and Bikini
after postwar homes had bunkers
and children desks,
the men came to a hill in Livingston
to hold vigil over the skyline
and test the atmosphere for war.
It was one point on the semicircle –
a last line of defense in case
the Russians attacked by air,
a locus to physicists who knew
about trajectory and energy,
the circumference of the earth
and at what velocity it revolved.
From Riker Hill, you could see
the distant flecks of energy,
New York a corona, always rising
with the uneasiness of a new day.
This is where we came years later
to feel invincible and irradiate
our frailties with Everclear.
This was after Gorbachev now
after glasnost and Chernobyl,
the abandoned barracks now
covered with graffiti to pay tribute
to some loner who halted
his trajectory with heroin.
They’d spray-painted over
“Death to Soviets”
so it said, “Death. So be it.”
My friends and I passed the grain
alcohol playing never have I ever
and would you rather, taking dares,
telling truths that were lies.
Didi rode the rocket launcher
like a mechanical bull, swaying
on the rusty hinges and 190 proof
before sneaking into the radar room
with a guy she knew.
The rest of us got loaded
on the concrete pad.
From here, we felt the surface of things.
What had we lost yet
but what we hadn’t earned?
Confidence, hard choices, real fear
the knowledge of our vulnerabilities,
I guess, or am I trying too hard to make it
more than it was? It was stupid.
It was the end of a millennium.
We knew that we should celebrate.
We were ballistic with our hearts.
Perhaps we knew we’d never be
together again and that’s all it was.
It wasn’t until years later that
I knew the velocity of an object falling
in space, that I knew about intercepting
and about being intercepted,
the unpredictable inertia of loss,
that the heart hits the ground
at precisely 90 miles an hour.
This was before Putin before Chechnya.
This was before I thought I accepted
that atoms and nations and couples split
and found out that I didn’t
and that I still don’t.
Michael J. Grabell grew up in a single-parent household, the son of a high school Spanish teacher and the grandson of an immigrant window washer from Ukraine. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Southwest Review, Best New Poets, Poetry Northwest, Rattle, North American Review, and the Best American Poetry anthology among others. Outside of poetry, Grabell works as an investigative reporter and editor for ProPublica, where has been a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for public service.