qarrtsiluni

We lived five miles downwind of Oak Ridge.
Its towers contained multitudes, shaded by the stubby
knuckles of oak leaves. My father’s Geiger counter
click-clicked its swaying tongue at me. Thirty years later,
thyroids of local children start acting up — cancers, syndromes, tumors.

(Dairy cows, asparagus and strawberry plants,
fruit in my mouth, snow in my hands.)

My mother as a child sprayed with pesticides
when she played in the fields. My father grew up
while men wrestled atoms. He learned to cap
contaminated soil, clay and concrete with their brittle grasp.
The reactor clasped in graphite inside a black building.

It was here they built bombs, or the beginnings of bombs,
electricity crackling through the oak woods.
Once, in the twenties, a madman jailed for prophesying the site,
saying “here would be built…” I don’t know if he died in jail.
In my backyard the skeletons of snails trapped in lime.

(Red clay, lilacs, daffodils, black bears and mockingbirds.
Vines of honeysuckle and morning glory, children chewing red clover.)

Always things hovering over us: mountains, thunderstorms, dark arms
of oak, a poisoned valley. Lightning bouncing across our yard,
bees swarming a horse. My father strode off to work
with government-issue TLD cards and a black suit. How much
radiation today, the card would tell him, but he knew it lied.

by Jeannine Hall Gailey

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