In my childhood

In my childhood      insects leave pieces of themselves 

everywhere	    Spherical eggs on a leaf	Moth cocoon 

with exit hole	 (Papery and brown)     The papery 

circles of a wasps’ nest	  Architecture held by a

thin stem	Webs	Dense as cotton wads	 Spread 

like an elegant hand	    Ripped     Or holding drops 

of water	A cicada skin with a slit in the back

See-through	(A complicated yellowing window)	A wax 

honeycomb suspended in a jar of honey	    Gather

what we are fond of	    Exterminate the remainder 

In my childhood      I gather what I’m fond of

at 1221 Merriewood Dr	  4.06 miles from the Brio Superfund Site 

Declared on March 31, 1989	   4 1/2 months before

I entered kindergarten	  to learn to read my way 

(one day) through a Wikipedia page listing the toxins: 

copper, vinyl chloride, 1,1,2-trichloroethane, fluorene,

styrene, ethylbenzene, toluene, benzene, and more 

Satisfying diagrams show how the molecules fit 

Pink color, orange color, blue color	  CH3

C6H6	I admire how a scientist puts a comma

in the middle of a word	   I like how he hangs a small 

number under a letter	Red color, purple color 

Hoops and stars	    “Aromatic hydrocarbons”

“Known human carcinogen”	    Opening a door on my memory 

So-and-so’s wide blue eyes	His brother’s wide brown eyes 

“I’m a Brio kid,” he says, meaning     We lived in the 

contamination zone	   and     Health studies shuttered

due to low participation	    Yearly packets of money 

for the remainder of your lives	The child carries 

the mutation and the man dies      It’s bucolic 

where they razed the houses	    Somehow it’s legal

for cows to graze on it     A host of pretty wildflowers

Luxuriant, luscious grasses nodding their broad 

shaggy heads     At sunset hordes of bats pour 

from under the bridge at Dixie Farm and Beamer

In the dark a longhorn lifts and turns his burdensome head 

In my childhood I	the refinery operates from 1957–1982

“unprocessed petroleum and waste materials”      “12 large earthen pits” 

“groundwater”	   In my childhood I scramble out from

the creek water	     spooling	   brown      opaque	  and placid 

Hiding something, maybe	An alligator or a snake 

Clambering out through the mud and sludge

Dangling from a large pipe of some type	A patch of 

wilderness	  among the strip malls and asphalt

Green light	    green trees     I gather a doll-size bouquet

of clover       A roly-poly pools in my palm	   In my childhood 

insects leave pieces of themselves	emissaries from

a natural world	   Many fewer each year

We could not live in peace	 Laying out pipes and lines 

and cement roadways and houses weighing many 

thousands of pounds      In my childhood

we entered the tunnels of the future	   Emissaries 

from a dwindling world	   Searching for an

entrance to get back to	 through tainted sludge and water

Read more from Issue 18.2.