I want to tell you about the birds. How I imagine they
quieted one by one until there was just one left, trilling
its single, unchanging note into the dark. Or maybe
it was that they fell silent all at once in the moments
that led to the explosion, in a sort of expectation humans
never learned: the instinctual, deferential. I’ve read that the birds
pulled from the disaster zone have cataracts, smaller brains.
The researchers declare negative effects overall. And in
the ghost cities of Chernobyl, of Pripyat, there are people still
who go about their lives cloaked in radiation like a wedding
gown. Wooden signs with crude lettering: Someone
still lives here. When the cancer came back, they injected
radiation into my grandfather’s bladder. When the cancer
came back, he started talking about genetic testing. No need.
My body is my grandmother’s body, too. Soon enough, macular
degeneration. Shots directly into the eye. Already, her migraines:
little explosions. I imagine a tumor, perched on my brainstem
like a question. The skin of my thigh where they removed
what could’ve been a cancerous mole, puckered, pink, rungs
of the ladder I climbed with my fingers. I hated touching it at first:
that evidence of something atypical in me, herald of its own disaster.
Leaving the doctor’s office, the remnants of a bird bloodied
the pavement. And from the trees, nothing but song.