Uranium Girl
From well water to bedrock, you poisoned this town.
Denied health claims, harvested kidneys, replaced our parts
until chrome meshed with flesh to pay off our medical debts.
Connected our hearts to nuclear reactors, our minds
linked to missile systems.
Our stolen futures became your advertisements
on paid programming, protection offered in shaped
latex, gas masks—titanium, vanadium. We are American,
bargain-hunter parasites taking up residence
in forgotten silos and pockets of light and steel
buried underground. We do not sleep.
We do not remember the urge to crawl
back to the surface.
You plunged our world into ash, crater made,
all in the name of ‘freedom.’ Sold our autonomy
to the highest bidder. Government contractors.
Angels of death. You made us all in your image,
your uranium girls, ready to kill in milliseconds.
The best offer made at the greatest cost
is still not a deal.
The circuit boards of C-RAMs, our new shackles.
Our brothers and sisters blast into the stratosphere,
dodging hellfire raining down at 4,500 rounds per minute.
We do not see them. We do not weep. We do not
remember the urge to hope or dare to breathe.
Our dreams lost to the event horizon.
Gods always eat
their children.
Grace R. Reynolds is a native of southern New Jersey, where she was first introduced to the eerie and strange thanks to local urban legends of a devil creeping through the Pine Barrens. Since then, her curiosity with things that go bump in the night bloomed into creative expression as a dark poet, horror, and thriller fiction writer. Her short fiction and poetry have been published by various presses. She is the author of two poetry collections from Curious Corvid Publishing, Lady of The House (2022) and The Lies We Weave (2023).
