Issue 2: William Doreski

Hot Zone

 

We're looting the weathered houses,

which even the vandals have avoided;

but the Commission burned the furniture,

and the survivors packed whatever

passed the Geiger test.


In a house of flowered wallpaper

we find behind glass cupboard doors,

a set of first editions from the Fifties:

Kerouac, Bellow, Lowell, Ginsberg,

McCarthy, Roth.

Something ghostly and enclosed


deters us from handling the books;

but something pithy and cruel

pushes me through a membrane


and I grab On the Road in perfect

dust jacket, wrap it in newspaper,

and pack it in my rucksack.    


She looks startled, perhaps

a subterranean protest; perhaps

she feels the earth's gesture,

an unsentimental shudder.

I don't care how radioactive


the books are--I'll have them

anyway, I say. So we slump, tote

heavy bags to the car; the air seems

thicker and tastes of snow. The vacant

houses, for a moment, fill with faces


full of longing, an effect of cold

winter sundown.  

We drive 


as fast as we dare

over unplowed roads, escape

the hot zone, leave the warp

in dimensions rupturing

our memory of the Fifties,

when atomic energy was good for us,

when the radiance of flesh enforced
sex

lives that assured the state


of sufficient yield to replace us

with little human isotopes

more eager than we to obey

the imperatives of a faith

that corrupts what it fails to kill.

--William Doreski

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