The rumor is
there’s a bomb shelter
beneath our little town.
Room for one hundred
people. A two thousand
pound door will slam shut
eternally beneath an orange grove.
No one over sixty-five
need buy a lottery ticket
for the 1960s kitchen stocked
with antibiotics, the gun room,
or the mildewed tunnel of seeds
left to propagate
along an exit yet unearthed
back into the civilized world.
Let’s call it the tribulation,
nuclear, rapture, asteroid,
a Biblical infestation
of palmetto bugs
(winged cockroaches),
Armageddon and all
I’ve ever seen myself
is a speakeasy
hidden beneath a fringed rug
in front of the reservation desk
at The Lakeside Inn downtown
where it is said that Al Capone,
with his knifed jaw, raised lead
crystal glasses of moonshine:
Salute, Cin Cin,
to the frenzied blasts of light,
all those barking faces,
loose and jawing down.
Alas, Babylon was a novel written in 1959 by Pat Frank
about a nuclear holocaust as experienced in the setting of
a surviving small town in Florida, called Fort Repose
(Mount Dora) where a bomb shelter was built in response
to the novel.