Atoms and Stones

by Nancy Dickeman

There is an atomic land along the crook in the river
where reactors’ shadows
once traced the Columbia’s currents.

Muddy-fingered children
rooted among the riverbank’s stones
looking for something

while radioactive particulates
floated in wind over orchards,
falling to the red moons of apples.

An ocean away,
the memory of Nagasaki’s dead
still drifts from there to here.

 

Nancy Dickeman’s poems, fiction and essays appear or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Post Road, Poetry Northwest, The Seattle Review, Pontoon Poetry, The Seattle Times, and other publications. Her debut poetry chapbook, Lantern, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2018. She has recently completed an historical novel, The Bed of Half-Lives, a nuclear age story.