Warning: Contents Unstable

by Paris Rosemont

"…hemorrhaging poems, each phrase peeled from the flesh in bandages"

                 ~Derek Walcott (The Walk)

OFTENTIMES my bandages get stuck on wounds still oozing. I have agitated

them prematurely again, weeping Fe2O3·nH2O staining my skin. I am 6x shades

darker than my innocence born, quivering tonsils, shaking bodily with unworldly

despair some two score four ago. Engulfed with molten crust that scabs around

my sloshing ache, the acid of shadows housed in a stainless steel drum stickered

in yellow and black, marked RADIOACTIVE. Warning: contents unstable. Deep

geological disposal recommended, according to the International Atomic Energy

Agency Paper that nobody bothered to read to the end. Cutting costs, the nuclear

waste of my past is packed into a shipping container on a cargo ship bound for Finland,

where it will be trucked to a near-surface disposal facility, placed inside a fuel pellet

inside a fuel rod inside a cannister insert inside a copper overpack inside a Bentonite

buffer inside tunnel backfill and buried under some five hundred metres of bedrock

that looks nothing like I’d imagined from watching reruns of The Flintstones on the Cartoon

Network on Saturday morning telly. Still, they have gone to great lengths to bury my pain.

I watch through a livestreamed broadcast, as my shit is laid to rest like a vampire in a silver-

lined casket, vault backfilled and capped with supposedly impermeable membrane and top-

soil. But they’ve skimped on the drainage and gas venting system. Eventually, the noxious

fumes bust open the lid, like Bonnie and Clyde staging a heist from the grave. Surprise, suckers!