Newly loose with death,
\nI can imagine her stomach, the give.
\nI bring her an oyster shell from the shore,
\nprop her head. A pine branch blanket.
\nYou taught me how to care for the dead like this,
\nhow to get quiet in their moment,
\nearly January, no other willing witness.
\nIt\u2019s big work. And even I step away,
\nwhisked back to life by the bus,
\nwhere in front of me a young man
\nvideo chats his girlfriend, who cries
\nthe entire hour-long ride as he slumps
\nfurther into his seat, humming short responses.
\nA whole bus of us listen to her pleas,
\nand despite her foreign tongue
\nI can feel the ruptures, the cold valleys.
\nI press a warm thumb into the sea
\nspinning past the window. Bleached shell,
\npine branch, stuttering connection.
\nWith these tired hands, we can only
\nbuild beds, soft spaces to land.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Officials in Japan are running out
\nof storage space for the ocean water
\nused to cool down Fukushima\u2019s
\nnuclear cores. Tens of thousands
\nof tons, all newly radioactive,
\nwith talks of releasing it all back
\ninto the ocean. Across the globe,<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
we fill a tractor load\u2014two or three
\ntons of grapes\u2014in four hours
\nwith a team of eight. What would
\na hundred tons of our juice look like;
\na thousand? I try to measure the ruined
\nwater in tractorfuls, but run out of room
\nin my mental valley. How diluted
\ndoes a radioactive ocean have to be
\nbefore it stops killing everything
\nit laps up? How much longer
\nwill the waters stand us?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Here, the H\u00e9rault\u2019s been low
\nall summer, thirsty, only two storms
\nfilling her throat. The gorges dried,
\nscratchy. Her rocky bottom cuts
\ninto my kayak\u2019s belly, though
\nthe carp are fat, the seaweed
\nan impenetrable forest. Here, slung<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
between the map\u2019s bright red pins
\nthat mark each nuclear throne,
\nI imagine the steel drums planted
\nbeneath us, beating out a cold,
\ntoxic tune. The foxes are hungry.
\nTourist-trained, they visit us
\nat picnic hour, panting, patient,
\ncatching grapes in their skinny mouths
\nswarmed by flies, fleas trampolining
\nfrom their fur as they polish
\navocado peels of their fatty linings.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
From a too-hot summer, the vines
\nhave fried, harvest light this year.
\nThe last fat bulbs were stripped
\nin the night by wild boars, though
\nChristian is diligent in his midnight
\nrounds, has caught half a dozen
\nperpetrators already. At lunch time,
\nhe brings me their pink meat
\nin a small Tupperware, cut
\nneatly into strips.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I press a warm thumb into the sea <\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":6801,"template":"","categories":[9,49,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6799","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-literary-features","category-poetry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n