Three Mile Island

I still dream of those snowy white smokestacks,

permanent mushroom clouds.

The way the news cameras caught them in the flaming

sunrise over the Susquehanna. It was late March,

but when I remember the meltdown, it seems like summer.

Maybe it was that fear of being cooked or the earth

opening up and sinking us all to China.

I wanted to be there, wearing plaid pants, wide collar

jacket and Dad’s Vitalis slicking back my hair.

Wanted that microphone, puffed like cotton candy

against my lips in near hysteria at the scoop of 1979.

I couldn’t sleep for five days, waiting for the hydrogen

bubble to burst and kill us all. Pennsylvania seemed

really close when I was 10 and the doomsday mass

held by the Harrisburg priest didn’t help. He offered

general absolution and I, not even a Catholic,

not having yet set foot in a church, quietly prayed

to be a witness, an Armageddon altar boy.

In school, they used to make you crawl under a desk

with your hands locked over your head, as if this could

save you from the bomb. Fuck that.

If I’m going to be incinerated, I don’t want the slow

leaching death of cancer. I want to be standing

at the window as the flash comes, like those soldiers

at Trinity 1945, sunglasses reflecting a fire that should

have never been conjured, the wind in my hair.

– Collin Kelley 

from Render