Seth Copeland

Crescent

for Karen Silkwood

Logan County waste, the unnoticed fissure,
Great Plain(s) typical, the facility
south of town sits empty now—
bunker of faded poisons, chemical stale
with a shard of angry roar.
The air’s amphetamine hot here,
the blood so urgent, desperate
with the summer rage leaning hard into all of us.
“The founders of Kerr-McGree were self-made men
of the caliber that civilized the West—”
Coming in,
you know what you’ll see
and none of it will answer your questions.
Just a town like all of it, most of it.
At least one main highway, one feeble main street,
one place to drink. If there’s a fight there,
everyone will know in 24 hrs.
Crescent cannot keep a secret, will not keep a secret.
No corpo fiefdom is safe from the ugly spirit.
It’s festering seep leaves a glowing infrared scent,
on a night drive to a meeting—
a flat flash, gashes still in the culvert.

DR. MORGAN
When you are working with this plutonium in a hood, or a desk, it looks very
innocent, nothing happens; you see it day by day, no harm done; it doesn't
explode; it doesn't often catch fire—it looks very harmless.

………………………………Uranium hexafluoride
UF6: hex to those who enrich uranium with it,
a parting of isotopes for better weapons
and other things you won’t see happen.
Nuclear processing—war glow in metal,
metal always we molt & bend weapons from metal.
In Inkai, Kazakhstan,
they pull metal teeth through the crust
for ore. North of the Cimarron River they invent war
with it. In war, there are spies.

In peace, there is no information,
no data balm,
no deep state intelligence for proletarian eyes.
Who leaks the figures? Who finds the bloody bones?
2pm sharp at a diner in town.
The salad is bad but the fried foods are popular.
Nervous coffee mouths move.
Folders slide. Materialism.
There is a fight here and everyone knows.
Photograph. Develop.
Swipe. Praxis.

Uranium increases blood pressure,
strangles the kidneys dry & cakey.

Somehow we don’t talk about this
every day, how this happened,
who did it.

Chelsea Manning
was born here,
raised in booze here,
queer in Oklahoma where the moon
is dust brood dull.

MR. WARD
Given what reviewed in regard to Miss Silkwood’s contamination, how would
you characterize its seriousness?

DR. MORGAN
I consider it one of the worst cases with which I am familiar of body
contamination with plutonium, in terms of persistence, in terms of repetition,
in terms of contamination of her home.

………………………North of the City, it’s all forsaken—
soda pop Arcadia, Guthrie frozen in 1901,
Edmond’s evil noose shadow.
The scabby hills along the highway blister in the grass
like irradiated gloves.
Bath burn for contamination, solvent reducer,
a body caught between poisons in a cinderblock jail.
………………………“[I]t's only the submicron particles
which deposit in the lower respiratory system;
the larger particles deposit
in the nasal-pharyngeal and the bronchial regions,
and are swallowed. There one would look at
what was ingested;
one would have fecal samples to see how much of it
was swallowed;
one would need sputum samples.
At the time they found
plutonium on the nose swabs,
they didn't seem particularly concerned.”

Check contaminated.
Solve.

Speed limits will not save you
from tailgating in Oklahoma.
from a name red & smudged,
from documents missing,
from greater lies leaking
from the soft mouth of power.

………………………The Cimarron’s marbled vein
slides south, night blue that blurs to red in May.

“Crescent” quotes a photo caption from Who Killed Karen Silkwood? by Howard Kohn (Summit Books, 1981) as well as passages from “Problems in the Accounting of and Safeguarding for Special Nuclear Materials: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment of the Committee on Small Businesses, House of Representatives, 94th Congress, 1976.”