#23

Pripyat, Ukraine

I had heard that Pripyat was a good place
to make a buck if you were short on moral
fortitude. The exclusion zone, as aptly named
as any place, welcomes rogues, thieves, ex-military
men in its fictions and its truths. The pulse of the city
was extinguished in a radiation high. I had not heard
before of radiation leaving such gold deposits.

She sits among the dead grass, like blown
down by a dirty, dirty bomb. Too much
dirt that was dropped here. In sifting
through the dust piles I find a necklace.
The shine, I catch it in my eye as a fishmonger
caught my hand in the market. He is dead,
but the people here are deader, flatter ghosts.
They were wiped by progress from the atomic
clock. At the end of the golden chain is something,
not to believe in, no, but a locket. A blank golden
hole, a heart with none of the tons of dirt, is resting inside.
Her treasure, saved for Petro, hid from Aleksander, almost
given to Ivan.

The day before Pripyat became Pompeii:
Her eyes melted down her face for him. She
went positively nuclear. He too yielded in a slight
way taught him by his father. They were coming
together, two live things full of atoms. The evacuation
savaged the moment in two. Her father dead, her womb barren.
Explosion and arousal, two radioactive, untouchable things. Ivan
went to school somewhere in Prague. She decided to dry up
and become an unpracticed widow through stiff resignation.
The locket is just as bare and bears her meaning well. A scoured
golden slate as useful as these shattered windows all around.
In looking there is an absence of anything but a small performance
in a classic loop pattern. Above this locket she is a music box
dancer in the dust and the broken glass. She dances above
the lonely ferris wheel and hospital as she becomes a cloud.
In the rubble there is an infinite pattern of humanity. She was
not so special that I should save this meditation.

The locket concerns me just as far as it will weigh
heavier than the simple chain. The heart will be melted down
and repurposed for another try. I slip the thing into my dusty jeans.