Uranium Heritage Day

The city was built on Cambrian rifts, boot-sucking mud, a rush to stake alliances. Now it’s birch, white pine, and alder creaking, a low, flat tailings pond where nothing thrives. …

Illustration by Walter Scott
Illustration by Walter Scott

The city was built on Cambrian rifts,
boot-sucking mud, a rush to stake alliances.
Now it’s birch, white pine, and alder creaking,
a low, flat tailings pond where nothing thrives.
Cat’s cradle of a radio tower the only hint

that the human hive once buzzed,
air-drilling its way from darkness to darkness.
Like trees in Kyiv that have been dead for twenty years,
still fully in leaf, you imagine breaking a branch
and hearing the hiss and crack of a voice.

Doesn’t an engine revving somewhere seem to lend the flies
that gather round us like a prayer? There’s no one here.
Mushrooms tilt their mitres like a brotherhood,
break the locked box in the wood. A sticking point:
that the day has never been more beautiful and clear;

this place you’re more likely to be struck by lightning
than attacked by a bear. Into spore-charged air
the blow-by-blow seems to take—that, in the beginning,
houses bloomed like campanulas on the highest point;
that, in the end, it wasn’t the mine but the mall that collapsed.

This appeared in the April 2015 issue.

Jeff Latosik
Jeff Latosik published his second collection, Safely Home Pacific Western, in March 2015.
Walter Scott
Walter Scott published a full-length comic based on his ongoing series, Wendy, in November 2014.