Baby blue-eyed clairvoyant
heart coughing up the mucus of sentimentality
Her savior hands against the glass,
pressed against the grubby hands of a foreign
child crying: Death! Infection! Radiation!

Still other voices cry from the television screen,
a buzz in her apocalyptic ear: Death to tropes,
to the movies we’ve seen before!

She bounces her fist against her breast.
It beats: I will save the world.
A tear falls in close-up, her eggshell bed and a forlorn teddy bear
reflected in the convex.

The teleprompter rolls on, exhausted.

Baby blue-eyed clairvoyant glares
at the artificial sunlight of her dome room, vowing
she will save every grubby hand
and every diseased foot.

The newscasters sigh, the teleprompter runs out,
and poison gas descends upon mankind.