Day One

Title: Radiation is a week without sleep

This piece comes from a poem about an old friend of mine whose father passed when we were in junior high.

***

Re: Fallout/1995

I.
The memory begins
with the death
of your dad.

It was Nevada’s
nuclear science
that started the tumor,
old men living so deep
in the desert that
radiation chooses skin
instead of sand or rock.

This is cancer.
It is unavoidable.
You will be compensated.
It will not be enough.

II.
Even at the funeral you didn’t cry.
I was suspicious.

I’m sorry.

III.
The beauty of speed
is that I never knew
until your bones
showed through
and you stopped showing
up for school.

Your mother worked skeleton shifts
in the Emergency Room.
Even she failed to notice.

IV.
Maybe your father had been dead
a long time.

Maybe your father had always
been dead.

V.
Radiation is a week without sleep.
Scientists are studying you
as we speak, smashing particles
over your widow’s peak.
Your mother gives you an Advil
and goes back to work.

You dye your hair black.

The memory ends here.