Dead Elk Sleeps Next to a Decommissioned Nuclear Power Plant
Michael Garrigan
and still hears the thrum of the turbines
and smells strontium-90 in hot-cell ghosts
and still tastes uranium on blueberry leaves.
The morning glow reminds him
of the time their forest burned
and he ran downvalley with wolves
and the hares
and the mule deer
and the hawks
cut through ash clouds
mapping their way to safety,
but they lost each other in the smoke,
he and his mother and his sister split
like atoms by the collision of ember and
fur; he felt his sister burn, her leg caught
between a boulder and a pile of still-hard dead
cedar, and when the air cleared he found his mother
and they stepped into water to cool their hooves and
began the waiting that is always there, stored, humming.
Michael Garrigan writes and teaches along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania and believes that every watershed should have a Poet Laureate. He is the author of two poetry collections — River, Amen and Robbing the Pillars. He was the 2021 Artist in Residence for The Bob Marshall Wilderness Area. His writing has appeared in Orion Magazine, River Teeth Journal, and North American Review. You can read more at www.mgarrigan.com