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.
NRC File Photo.
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? Verdurousfuse 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
NRC File Photo.
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.