Читать книгу tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 - Lee Ann Roripaugh - Страница 14

radioactive man

the papers started calling me

Radioactive Man after tests from

the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

revealed the highest radiation levels

in anyone they’d ever screened

I guess I’m the champion, I joke

to reporters who come for interviews

like visitors from another planet

bulky and brightly awkward

in white hazmat suits, they look

like mourners at a Buddhist funeral

and so I light a cigarette to dangle

from the corner of my lip and grin

even eight miles away, in Tomioka,

the sound of Reactor 4 exploding

was completely unmistakable,

so I took my elderly parents south

to my aunt in Iwaki, who refused

to even open her door to us because

she said we were contaminated

then we tried a temporary shelter

but it was full, so we came home

again to the no go zone, and when

other relatives agreed to take in

my parents, I stayed behind

to care for the abandoned animals

I’ve seen many terrible things:

cages filled with withered songbirds,

horses left to starve in their stalls,

an abandoned puppy that grew

too big for the chain around its neck

I rescue as many as I can:

the dog trapped inside a barn

for months, who survived by eating

the dead flesh of starved cattle

or the feral ostrich so vicious

the police who border patrol

the nuclear exclusion zone

armed with Geiger counters

nicknamed her The Boss

all over Tomioka, the animals

recognize the sound of my truck,

and come running to meet me

when I make my daily rounds

many come to stay with me

at my family’s old rice farm

living without water

or electricity in the ruins

of the town where I was born

is sometimes very lonely

I wait for cancer or leukemia

and joke to The Boss about

becoming a superhero through

a radioactive ostrich bite

sometimes I think of visiting

my two kids, who live

with my ex-wife in Tokyo,

but then I remind myself

of the invisible dust coated

in cesium particles that’s in

my clothes, my hair, my skin

I remember I can see my future

in the sick animals I care for

in the American Watchmen comics,

Dr. Manhattan was once tricked

into believing he’d given everyone

he ever loved cancer, through

exposure to his radioactive body

just the thought of this undid him,

made him feel so solitary and blue

he left the earth behind for eons,

to brood in exile on the moon