Elle Fournier
B Reactor

The site was chosen because of its isolation and because of the abundance of water from the Columbia River, which could be used as a coolant for the reactor...B Reactor produced plutonium that was used in a test explosion at White Sands, New Mexico, and in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
—Zach Cook, Nuclear Legacy

The sun falls behind our mountain
like a child colors an Easter egg;
he splatters red and yellow vinegar
on mother’s favorite dress,

leaves only silica to sparkle.
When we were smaller
we thought it might be uranium
glittering in the sand—

or tips of spider legs, still with life
left to grasp our bombing-range soil,
weaving threads of talc
between private underground pools,

snagging the 60,000 apparitions
that dangle from delicate spools.
Beneath paltry abundance,
a spindly swingset under desert noon,

every morning we dug, raw-handed
and Fruity Pebble fresh, scooping down
until the sand was wet and cool.
Once, we dug so low we stood

tip-toed, bottom-stranded—
waiting to hear mother whisper
in father’s ear; the muffled
cry of airplanes we counted two

by two; the murmers of a patient
monsoon. No one had told us
what the water knew—
how to weave graveyards

into rope ladder,
to press pursed lips
against earth, to suck away
every drop.

King Cardamom

I found you before the first cutting, before flecks of alfalfa
peppered streets silkened by early summer sun.
I didn’t know then what a body needs—crème fraîche
for a good rise, heaping spoons of rye and thyme, let rot,
the lipid slickness of an emerald cracked open and fried.
You taste green. With your graze I am without jaundice.
                                                      I am sweet and you—
your bite recalls machetes stinging blackberry brambles.
I cleared that meadow in a day, meeting you beneath the brush,
licking the blood off the wounded before sucking them whole.
You: the stigmata on my tongue, a rose petal clipped
by thorn; I taste only clover. Here, Cancer is not cancer,
but is you: a lip smacked patch of nettles left as an altar,
wild strawberries before the first frost.