Quiz #1.
Date._________________
Planned Expiration Date.________________
good morning. i am going to write 30 poems before december.
let me count the ways i don't have hope
then the ways i do.
Rebecca Solnit says infuse hope.
Z, our mutual friend, says the same.
i read a book of hers, Savage Dreams, filled with
stories that lap over my life, laps, swimming laps, my father swam back and
forth, sitting on my father’s lap, stories about women strike for peace and the
desert and my mother’s story infused in there, and my body’s cancer story and
the American story all a jumble and Berkeley in the sixties and it turns out
that her brother X went to jail with my brother Y for an anti-nuclear
protest, and a man i loved is friends with her brother X, and he’s one of
the Xs in her book, and i canceled our friendship, but Z is
friends with him, and Rachel
Carson now has a statue in Woods Hole, and I should have been there for the
dancers who memorialized gene pools and
he never held my hand, it was all
about sex
facebook is god.
human beings break hearts and planets. or is it stars?
small love, big love, what’s the difference?
is there a difference between a broken heart and a nuclear
bomb explosion?
this is a poem about love.
nobody knows the difference or cares, so you must knock on
the doors of your neighbors’ houses, and give them this quiz: where is the closest
nuclear power plant? what is a storage pool for spent nuclear fuel
rods? what temperature must it remain before the rods explode? how do you split an atom? why in the hell would you split an atom? why do they use uranium and where does it come from? what happens to a landscape that is mined for uranium? do you
know what happens when a terrorist flies a plane into a spent fuel pool?
i am looking at the ocean now and changing the subject. subjective realities are far more interesting
than objective realities. don’t objectify me. say, what is the goal of philosophy or literary theory? do
something real. plumbing. build a house. seed the earth. this word is an abstraction, a hyperreal non-thing. it.
don't be so high and mighty.
what is real?
i/me will tell you what’s real. loneliness. running water. three full core meltdowns. millions of gallons of radioactive water. children with thyroid abnormalities. death.
fukushima.
will you go with me on a pilgrimage there? fess up. it scares you. YOU won’t admit
it. you’ll placate to get
your name in print and get funding. say radiation is
safe. but do YOU live in Fukushima? do YOU go camping in Chernobyl? would YOU buy a radioactive dog? why is it forbidden for pregnant women to get x-rays, but YOU say it's all the same: bananas, airplanes, Cesium 137, plutonium, strontium 90, but when it suits, YOU laugh and remind us about the short life of tritium that YOU leak. ha ha and all the fellas drink the tritium in YOUR home-made beer. it comes right out in your pee. you say: ha ha ha
weep not for the weary.
or the mothers who flee with internally contaminated children.
it's so easy to confuse the poor ignorant people who cannot understand physics or the news.
do you have an evacuation plan?
three big tuna swimming in the sea. radi-o-act-i-vi-ty.
am i the walt whitman of the sea?
my chest hurts, right in the spot on the upper right of my chest near the shoulder almost where the port catheter
used to live. turn down the volume
please. i am getting way too loud. search in the archives. be thankful. hang on tight the american e-conomy is sinking/booming shale/gas/tar/oil
and privacy has been given up to Google. hello edward snowden.
i was in the Russian airport, too, a summer ago. it was empty in Moscow and crowded in Petersburg.
swimming pools. Americans. we have them in our back yards. they are mostly kidney shaped.
in Japan, it is the old people who protest now.
i dream of swimming in and out and around them. spent fuel rods. radioactive mermaid am i.
the fukushima workers have been lied to. they ingested 20% more radiation than previously told, but they, lucky souls, get free cancer testing. catscans are highly radioactive. e-qual to exposure to the Hiroshima explosion. all things being equal, i did not see that on the form when i signed away my future.
look homeword angels. Buddha Blue. hope. there is always hope.
a man stands with a remote driving an electric car in the
parking lot by the beach in the too warm weather.
every day i ask the question: what will become of us?
we save pictures of animals on our computer screens and love
one thing only.
this quiz counts for 100
million years of oceans free of human trash.
this poem is too long. i wrote it in a parking lot.
a nuclear power plant is a plutonium factory. not good. no
