The Oak Ridge girl gathers fossils in her fingers,

trilobytes and bits of coral twirling in the stone.

She learns lessons in mascara from her neighbors,

teenage girls in cutoffs who frizz their bangs and sneak beer

 

out of their mother’s fridges. She’s dimly aware

of men in black suits who haunt her house, asking questions

on the sidelines, of the safe in the closet that must never be opened.

She knows her father wears a badge to measure his daily

 

radioactive exposure. On the basement bar sits a Geiger counter.

Her father loves to garden, but under his fingers the roses wither in the sun

and the red clay doesn’t support his favorites. Her mother has better

luck with the locals:  daffodils, dogwood, spirea and azalea.

 

The fruit trees grow whether or not they’re tended. The tiny wooden pears

never make it to adulthood. The girl throws them idly at her brothers

in the yard. Like her, they grow stunted in soil soaked in moody rain

carrying cesium, lead, strontium: the fruits of her father’s lab.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Boris Mann on Flickr