I wish I could
leave the issues of the past
behind me
but they follow
me into the now
demand replay
because it seems
they’re never gone

So here’s another one. From Fine Madness, Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 1986. I read the words of the perceptive editors, I read the other contributors, I read myself in them and then I read myself. It’s always joy to feel that I belong.

		so easily

	why do we forget
	I remember
	when I was nearly a child the reports
	of clouds from Nevada New Mexico drifting
	toward California death
	the unsafe dust the rain
	no longer pure the pasturage
	denounced the milk by thousands
	poured back into the contaminating earth
	Strontium 90 powdering on the conversational lips
	and doctors who could not recognize
	the sickness in the babies who cried
	and told the mothers what was needed
	more milk more milk
	and babies born in hushed mutation
	without limbs or faces
	and we knew even then
	this was the symbol for ourselves
	struggling against the intersections of time
	and I remember
	the indrawn breath of the radio
	the inability of our entertainment
	to satisfy unstable minds
	the story of the woman in the watch factory
	who painted luminous dials
	and came home from work glowing in the evening
	we laughed in terror that
	radiation was invisibly everywhere
	and we were the children of the atom
	decaying in our half life
	and I remember