ATOMIC MAN

After a 1976 Hanford industrial explosion, Harold McCluskey, 64, was kept in isolation for five months to prevent exposing others.

One look at me and you’d guess
the laboratory accident—a thousand-thousand
shards of glass, the sparkling arc

of radioactive americium. At least
I’m patriotic, scarred and striped
acid red, and blue. I’m a medical miracle,

the most contaminated man on earth
who ever lived. No one
wants to shake my hand.

If the sun were the size of the sun,
my heart would be a baseball
in the steel and concrete isolation tank

at the edge of the hospital parking lot
I call home. I am a planet now—cragged
surface, magmatic core, and my nurses

might as well be astronauts.
I imagine under their space suits
they are beautiful. This half life

is lonely. My wife brings news and our dog
who doesn’t know any better.
A few old friends shout greetings

through the door. If I have a superpower,
it might be clearing a room in seconds.
Or living 10,000 years, fading little by little.

-- Kathleen Flenniken
This poem is included in the collection, Plume,
(University of Washington Press, 2012.)

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