September 11, 2024

Nuclear Herbarium

Radha Marcum

Photograph from Mary Stamos’s collection of mutant blossoms from the Three Mile Island meltdown.

MUTANT GLORIOSA DAISIES

Mary Stamos Collection, Three Mile Island

With floret centers so prolific
they turn—furred caterpillar folds?
zipped mouths? burn marks?—
the quite contrary daisy faces grow
dense in Mary’s garden.
Pollination breezes come mixed with
other winds in the wind in the onrush
of nuclear decay. Effects,
say officials, unclear, but clouds seed
cellular buildup in flowering parts,
and Mary’s daisies overwork
to work, as she does, in the hush-hush
becoming—what? By the silver bells
of the split river, Mary, Mary
gathers rows to array for committees:
their smiles mimicking the daisies’,
elongated by duplicity.


MUTANT QUEEN ANNE’S LACE

galaxies in the lattice of look-through : you

look through me : from umbel to umbel-

double I am [am I?] undomesticated carrot

blooms : constellated : delicate : simple

as umbrellas blown open in subatomic storm

and blossom memory : can you see

 

my secret? old Earths (atmospheres) rouse

and compel my seeds : the more radiant skies

 

that predate teeth and the teeth of your eyes

biting in : look : I am not one : not one

sensical stem : but two for the picking : so choose

[will you?] my knotted stars and the dropped

stitches of time-space : I am [oh, yes] fulgent

for the bumblers : for your flown body : for my own


MUTANT DANDELION

Yes, a seed eminence.
Then a menace of
stem. I I, therefore I
thirst with force—
my stalk, approximate
girth of milkshake
straw, hollow. [See:
radiation survivors,
unquenchable thirst of.]
Absence fills my O-
throat, atomic anatomy
becoming habitat here.
Bodies changing shape.
Do you snub my green
profusion, my lion’s teeth
[where whimsy married
predatory hunger]
my extra inflorescence
reaching fractal release?
Heed this: I riot yellow.
I radiate for you, untilled.
Pick me or pick me
not, make a post-chain-
reaction chain of me
and my likenesses or not,
I will overbloom.
I will adorn the change
if not a childhood. I will
habituate you to my
presence in what you call
your field.


MUTANT YELLOW ROSE

Look, my double bud is a stubbornness I pursue

in pursed petals, as if holding breath for the paranatural

elements that persist here, serrated sepals sensing

dense air. Am I more than a job doing its body? Verdurous

fuse box, I parse the code- altering particles that make more

of me than I want. You too sway and refuse, so accept

this yolk-hued withholding. I am [am I not?] so bold.


MUTANT ROSE

after mistakes : after the reactor melts down : failure
has a sharp metallic taste : becomes acrid ghosts

in wet mouths : in walls : in the gardens’ green cells :

in the tang and DNA of wild things a rogue radiance
unfolds : and so a common rose writes one self

too many : two blossom heads : an over-eager stem

rising where progeny and bees should be : anther-
and stigma-less : [don’t be so— ] : yet irrepressible

syllables unfurl : petals burned white : syntax bent

in the whorls and stems : and so pollinators ghost
the sterile bloom : and like a flower shot through with

mutant exuberance, I clasp my hands : I cannot help

the radioactive dust rising in your roots : these words
an apology with so many green facts to support



MUTANT SUNFLOWER

Did you pray for this? A
double doubt? A multiplied self
to say your life back to you?
I and I elongate in opposite
directions on a deranged stem
one face facing up as a second
faces back fist closed—
my split blossom heads touched
by a radiance other than sun.
You remember my wild kin:
Evenings as a child walking
after dinners into adulthood
with friends you talked in alleys
among them. They grew
from fence lines by trash bins.
Away was your dream as they
prayed wheeling suns into kernels
to feed returning goldfinches.
What should I have been?
You see, it may be too early or
late in the field to know
elation from dark seed.


LEGACY SITE

Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge, former nuclear weapons plant

At the pullout I’ve mapped to after

              decades, lavish toadflax and cheatgrass

wave at what’s passing fast. Fields sweat

              white bindweed. From the sign marked

Refuge, I enter. Yes, praying rains keep

              down the dust. Leveled hills wind back

to range and suburb. Hazy. I wade

              beyond my unseeing. Chains that agencies

strung up for my protection or theirs, or.

              The tolerant seeds, mixed in, succeed

at locoweed, mullein. A patchwork blush

              of blanket flowers. Yes, hushed, but in

detectable levels, stray Plutonium atoms

              burn in topsoil, barely root-held. Radial

thistles spike near gone cooling ponds

              that tried. A grasshopper sparrow chirrs

from its perch as a blue Mylar star—slipped

              from a child’s wrist? a party nearby?—

drifts into power lines. Toward facts gone

              critical in xeric prairie. Blown, yes, toward

the legacy site—toward Woman Creek and

              the hilly brain folds that kept weapons plant

apart. I turn. Squint back at home, hidden

              by hills. See how my mind made its home

in not—not downwind. Yes, we lived

              in agencies, I mean adjacencies. Hot scars

bandaged in grass, asphalt, flax. Children

              in the math, with buried factors. Eyes for

restoration and residual effects. A meadowlark

              signals from my blind spot. Cottonwoods

drink down seams toward the city. Yes, it was

              a city then. It is. Horizon like. Weighed

in plain sight. The uncontainable plains

              wind and watershed our throats close on.