Chernobyl Year

We dreamed of glowing children, their throats alive and cancerous, their eyes like lightning in the dark. We were uneasy in our skins, sixth grade, a year for blowing up, for learning that nothing contains that heat which comes from growing, the way our parents seemed at once both tall as cooling towers and crushed beneath the pressure of small things— family dinners, the evening news, the dead voice of the dial tone. Even the ground was ticking. The parts that grew grew poison. Whatever we ate became a stone. Whatever we said was love became plutonium, became a spark of panic in the buried world.