WEEK THIRTY-FOUR: ATOMIC

It was a heavy thing. 

They hoisted it

in the desert for testing

but weren’t sure

the wire would hold,

so stacked fifteen

old army mattresses

beneath it

should it drop.

They made it in a hurry

and kept no schematics.

Later they could

not replicate it. 

One of the scientists,

when asked

how he’d built a particular tube,

described bending aluminum

around a Coke bottle.

There were pregnant women

of course in Virginia

and Nagasaki, who did not know

how to build what they built,

bending themselves

like rinds around the soft

seeds of their flesh, as though

they could keep

the world without,

without even a blueprint.

No idea of how it is done

even as it is done.

-        From The More Extravagant Feast (Graywolf Press, 2020); used with permission of the author and Graywolf Press.

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