Weapons Grade: Poems

CODE NAME: 731

C O D E N A M E : 7 3 1 In the ’90s 731’s doctor ran the Japanese lab that distributed AIDS-laden blood for transfusions. The Tokyo developer’s Let there be land! unearths one cell of 731, the Asian Auschwitz where live GIs lost their livers to the Japanese whitecoats. A dragon steps forward in big flame, mushroom smoke and add to this, fawning. Stomach talk: U.S. and Tokyo. Weeds occupy the world. Is there sense to that? To yet meet the field’s dragons, grief airs itself as joke. The ballerina geisha with only four toes a foot circles, a wee wee wee all the way home. We were going to be in trouble if American soldiers asked us about the specimens. says the 84-year-old nurse Toyo Ishii to Japan Times, September 10, 2006. No time for fire. 15 Or so the nurse said, her name the same as the “Secret of Secrets” director. His hospital curls up, vanishes under Toyama No. 5 apartment block. The geisha’s toes go just over the bones, the dragon’s teeth waves its maimed warriors, the field’s so green and besides— B-side of that tune— the reptile egg hatches in the dirt, the mother pooping them then webbing away into the PBS ballerina-themed sunrise/set, flashing post-atomic fire, all wind-up. Because nothing stays buried, (surely hyperbole, where doubt digs) sidereal time slips, stomachs talk and now we feel all those dendrons, sighting dragons, a big number—731— citing lot and the footnotes of where the Japanese nurse worked, no geisha, no ballerina but octogenarian who tells you your toes, your little held back giggle ready to launch pigs big and little, none alien, all-American, 16 allowed no prosecution, which is how we bought their files. We bought the files. How much cold can a body take? How little liver? The boys’ bones turn up in the Tokyo lot. 17 ...