Downwind from Pecos
by Margaret Randall
Downwind from Pecos, cedar scent
invades our nostrils,
transparent as sky’s unreachable blue
until this cloud that is not cloud
but poison plume,
smoke rising imminent on horizon’s shoulder,
reminds us Los Alamos is on fire
again
its people ordered to leave again
just as eleven years ago, ordered
to leave
in that orderly fashion, lines of
careful cars, each keeping its
distance
from the one in front.
Voracious cloud, chewing mountain ridge,
spews ash,
menacing orange glows in its bloated belly,
30,000 55 – gallon drums of nuclear waste
wait restive
as flames advance and leap,
and other fatal chemicals cross their fingers
in this game
of Russian roulette.
Spokesmen look directly into the camera
force eyes
to focus, say there’s nothing
to worry about: like Fukushima Daiichi,
or Fort Calhoun
trembling on the banks of the rising Missouri,
before them Chernobyl and Three Mile Island:
each time bomb
dressed in the reassuring lie
until blood drains from noses and ears
skin buckles
and internal organs trip over themselves
in their rush to an exit whose door
melts
before we reach its threshold of deliverance.
Zara Raab
her most recent book is The Book of Gretel. Swimming the Eel is due out later this year. Her work appears in West Branch, Arts & Letters, Nimrod, The Dark Horse and Spoon River Poetry Review, with poems scheduled to appear in Evansville Review and River Styx. Her literary reviews and essays appear in Redwood Coast Review, Poetry Flash, Rattle on–line, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Colorado Review.
Peter Manuel
has been active in Portland, Maine’s poetry scene since the 80s. For five years, he hosted the now – defunct Geno’s Live Poets Society. He’s published a Sheltering Pines Press chapbook, ”(!!)exclamations(!!)”, which made an International Splash (in his eyes only) in 2005. He is, at present, assembling a scintillating sequel.
Michael Macklin
is a writer living in Portland, Maine. He is a poetry editor of The Café Review and earns his bread swinging a hammer.