Assistant Editor Connor Yeck: In “My Own Nuclear Destruction,” Charlotte Hughes bring us daily life in the shadow of nuclear energy and potential disaster. Using excerpted language from the Sandia Report (a governmental study on strategies to warn far-future civilizations of the dangers of buried nuclear materials), the poem is charged with waiting, caution, and threats that circle just out of sight.
My Own Nuclear Destruction
Fort Jackson Supermarket, South Carolina
(with language from the Sandia Report)
This message is a warning about danger. Taps plays
In aisle eleven. Petrochemicals and posterity,
The small boy working temp is dipping his mop
Into the gray water, then the wringer, turning a switch off,
Then on again. The butcher tips his powerful cap,
Marked by blood, at the shoppers.
This message is a message. It is
A powerful culture. It is the clock with GI
Mickey Mouse swinging from a single steel cable
Over the produce department.
At checkout, a guest reaches in the acrylic belly
Of a cartoon dog and finds a free cookie.
This place is not a place of honor. This location is best
Shunned. If the county reactor were to fail,
This entire town would slip on death, a pothole
Left broken first by fault, then by fact.
Frozen or canned? Toy gun or M4?
Outside, a Bless Our Troops bag connects
With the air, lifts a meter off the ground, then drops
Like the particular size and shape of the sirens’ howl
I’d hear before the static.
Charlotte Hughes’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in West Branch, Best Microfiction 2021, Modern Poetry in Translation, CutBank, Wigleaf, Fugue, and The Arkansas International. She was the recipient of the 2020 Meridian Short Prose Prize. She is a freshman at Yale University and reads for The Common.
For more miCRo pieces, CLICK HERE
