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Dieoff Eclogue
White Sands Missile Range
Desert violet with swallows. The dunefield’s expansive flashpoint.
After afternoons quinate with buckeye leaves, collisions cascading
into nothing. In their gravel nest below, house sparrow, cardinal, warbler
traceable in that certain draining glow as end of day brings bird-prints.
What humans find host? By the field, after the corn, we foraged for deer
bones & cobalt laudanum bottles in the overgrown midden. After the night
my grandfather glistered with the Bomb, desert out of sorts, blast
riffling his eyes & gawking lips. Everything frothed unforeseen
hues. Within skin, small openings insinuated softly the needles of light.
Downwind
Los Alamos, 1945 — Bucks County, 1999
Maps fissioned with downwinds
30.06 rounds thumbed into tooth sockets
foxes & bugles in wired open jaws
the martin house crawling untimely down its pipe
hammers gone soft under uncoiled light bulbs
eyes smearing wasps from hornworms
dubious signals blind-scaping gardens
morphless ghosts loosed from coyote piss bottles
dead groundhog growing new sockets weekly
the workhorse blue with exhaust
the workhorse shaved of bones
Bomb Pulse with Falconer’s Bag
Dead Animals #001 (1987) Richard Misrach
The bottom of this bomb crater piles
dried wildflower, hare, black
grouse, partridge, a brace of eyeless
colts fettering years on an altar
of half-live pelts. A spaniel longs
for a half-melted Boschian calf jeweled
with contaminates. This landscape
unhinges aesthetic.
Breeze croaks Lichtenstein bold
over slack tongues, severed morsels, sacrifice
zones. Grin-dripping desert looks on. Hunters
have always relied on the failure of meat
before it’s meat. See how fat glistens on the rind.
How blood slips below the frieze of clotted earth.
How sand renders a too common shade of travesty
before transfiguring into a looking glass.
How these hooves are stripped by vultures, these vultures
stripped clean by wind. How this world is tied in place
with materials sicced rabid on the material: dead foxes
strung-up with gristle, falcons hooded with skin,
hands abetted by leather, faces absolved by hoods.
We wash our palms of massacres
& go blindly into supper.
This is how we learn the act of witness.
How we learn how not to blink,
even as we go blind.
Even as our back teeth rattle
out of their sockets.
“Dear Georgie,
above the “scaveng- ing” earth
the history of rain echo e s like an ever-increas- ing TRINITY
The Virgin of Guadalupe as Seen in the Fire Index
Twenty-six planes folded
into these mountains, became the hitch & lilt of stone & sotol.
The range’s tongue slips down our backs decade by decade. As we walk, our packs
phantom-follow & agave blooms like gas fires on the hillside. Here is the language
of accidents: these hills, the gnawing life surrounding, the desert & its hunger, the extremity
of air. How malleable this mountain is. It reaches to add a two-seater Cessna to the history
of scree. Immortal like the flash burn on the backs of corneas when fuel tank ruptures &
the stones bloom chemical bright. The pilots are forgotten. A raven roosts in their calcified
imprint. Forgetting has an old tongue ingrown & glossolalic. Teeth working meat to nothing.
A silent primacy. Rocks slip down canyons singing with fusulinids trapped in sediment, faded
epochs. Birds swell dusk, ignite the failing sunlight. A pick-up burns by the highway-side.
Gasoline transfigures, tires buckle with heat, the headlights rapture, the box of 12 gauge shells
in the bed sows the air with voices. Dawn eats the sand red, then yellow, then shattered white.
Everything passes so quickly here, so slow. The truck remains, inanimate atrocity on
the shoulder. An untold happening. The mountains unfocus their gaze, as we shuffle through
fire’s historiography. We are a living artifact of unstudied apocalypses. The fires yet to come.
Night arrives again, folding over day, & the hills
populate the desert with ciphers craving space.
Half-Lives
Every day spills, dire & familiar.
The wrens light gas-pan fires across the dirt.
Landscape’s intimate fist palms corneas.
On barbed wire, birds channel static.
Out here, our superstitions murmur,
Hang a rabbit from a crossroad telephone pole.
Hope luck doesn’t rust.
Bury signs of mutually assured degradation,
alien & moonlit, beneath aborted wire fences.
Creosote crowns & bootprints glass sand.
All waters contaminate, all bones grow arrogant.
Migrating birds tune to invisible currents
tangle in the rags of discarded mountains.
Generations grow stunted
feeding off these bygone sights.
Carcasses to be cleaned off the edge of witness.
The advance scouts of red-shifted civilization.
Each flash-etched dawn shadows our shadows.
Each dusk falls with nothing left to inter.
What can we do but to dine on mouthfuls of earth?
“Dear Georgie,
in the morning singeing eyelashes pupil fireball eye am not a perfect lens eye (dazzle) blank out spectacular blind a bright after
However, in the field a few hours vision at distance eye dim eye Flash eye illu- minate
Bedrock, Touchstone, Anvil
taken incrementally
like sun swallowing earth
ragged shadow by ragged shadow
absence vaster than how far these code words
pull furrows across a desert stunted
with the insistent litany of aftermath
worn like a rock wears a river
we find bomb shards by the hundreds now
hollowed like how a socket empties a skull
like carbon done gentle violence by motes
of bomb pulse whittling
the stratigraphy of generations
press eye to crater & sight in
utter life like a caress
crawl across raging absence
wide as a bombing range wider still
until it is you cross-haired & cratered
then squeeze (never pull)
& it all blinks out
& back in because that’s
how blinking is — never finished with
mocking darkness & revelation
Bomb Pulse with Night Journey
William T. Rees, Pvt. Company A, Manhattan District, Santa Fe, NM 1945-46
Winter in the backyard like a yellowed undershirt.
Downwinds crack limbs. Years turn to gravel
in the driveway. Old man’s life-stale breath
threatens that the garage will never empty.
Nose plugged with suns. Eyes pilot lights.
Exhaust irradiate plywood, that hanged bulb.
The silence here is loose as white sand.
This moon, a dirty finger-nail,
thumbs the starter,
settles behind the bombardier’s glass.
Eyes glued shut he tried to sneak one final
glimpse at the floral wallpaper. Bells
of no distinct flower detonate Technicolor
like how on the cover of Time a soft mushroom cap grew.
The kind picked for his father, ripe with promise:
butter, salt, rosemary seared.
Let the kids chow first, in case the harvest
was ill-wired. After, a mushroom grew over the desert,
over old man glassed behind the garage door.
Not much to say that hasn’t not been said anyway.
Silence is always the first casualty.
Winter coughs —
old man, have we been here before?
“Dear Georgie,
faces, arms, hands, confined by summer in spite of thousands in charring in , the initial pulse in the open in the lower atmosphere in a line fire in partial shadow inadequate
flash and weeping human skin disappear gradually in thick overgrowths of time
How Some Children Play at Slaughtering Together
Goya painted 6 dead bream on moon-skewered sand
as his wife of thirty-nine years lay dying & France
stacked the dead of Europe like wind-scoured driftwood
these days we insist on paying our debts in blue tickets
while out on the tarmac the body brigade tries to rearrange
limbs into a 21st-century giant, approximate resurrection
while Hellfire & Mavericks trace old scars, bring down beams,
& immolate olive trees which have stood since the Janissaries
fell inauspicious & condemned like my students who
warn one another to renew their licenses before they turn 18
to avoid the flesh pots & draft cards as if somewhere below
creosote crowns, barely emancipated ICBM technicians didn’t
dream in shifts of atolls trembling with fire
Goya’s shriveled memory painting the sky brazen
with reentry patterns vivid & blinding & blue
& fishermen pull an atrocity of groupers in with their nets
wonder whose fingers those are pulling down
the clouds, glassing the sand, giants playing games
as if they were anything but gore-serious
“Dear Georgie,
completely absent eye however a m residual an element
In spite in excess in living tissue unable to go
Hibakusha
it ended
in Technicolor a vision hard to stomach
doing violence to witness
a city of shoulders craning necks
atomized into shadows
at the zero point sands so white
the earth bore its crumbling romance too long
captured in Alamogordo glass
my grandfather’s affair with an M1 Garand
out west in Los Alamos
almost romantic
hunting Nazi spies through twilight
spotlights their transmuted suns
at midnight cutting cows in two
with Thompson submachine guns
swapping whispers
swapping skins
(in bunks in skivvies)
of infinitesimal cancers
yet to be
us resulting bastards flash frozen
juiced on formaldehyde & downwinds
diagnose trace kinship
crosshatched in
radiation mapping a Hibakusha’s back
“Dear Georgie,
As with man, TRINITY (internal external) (whole body) walled body fall out surrounding loss fall out skin on grass fall out blood-form- ing
After, eye arise contaminate
C. Samuel Rees is a Pennsylvania-born, Texas-based poet & MFA candidate with the New Writers Project at the University of Texas in Austin. He subsists on a steady diet of eco-theory, Weird fiction, and horror movies. His work has appeared in Sonora Review, The Shore Poetry, Frontier Poetry, Bat City Review, Rust + Moth, Grimoire Magazine, and elsewhere.
33°40'38"N, 106°28'31"W
Trinity Site, Socorro County, New Mexico
I have never been to the Jornada del Muerto where, hemmed in by a military chain link fence, a12-foot tall volcanic rock obelisk marks the center of the bomb crater that is no longer there. In 1945, my grandfather stood three miles from point zero and watched the first atomic device (in his words) “go off just like the Picture on the Life Magazine only in Technicolor.” He was 18, had left school at 16, joined the army, and found himself serving in Los Alamos, New Mexico as a military policeman on the Manhattan Project. Not too long after he got his first glimpse of the Atomic Age, Hiroshima was bombed, then Nagasaki, and after that Bikini Atoll, and after that... I’ve never been to the site, but in our tissue, blood, and bones we all have been there, are still there, and will be there for a few million more years. As I write this on October 17th, 2021, we’ve been there for 76 years, 3 months, 1 day, and counting. All of us downwind, always.