Quiet auctioning of futures past by Samantha Boswell

Quiet auctioning of futures past

on Nuclear Landscapes: America’s atomic legacy*

Shh / Stuff going free / This broken lot

a degrading minefield of alarms /  

Countdown >

10                                                                                               

Rockets lie fallow, weeds

grow soft as fallout                                                                                    

in open fields

9

Stranded assets at ground

zero incubate fusion / tailings

net rubble-strewn plains

8

Descend dry concrete swimming

pools, prise rusted hatches,

enter silo space – vacant as ruins

7

To be lit by atomic power

is to come adrift; jettison life

like emptied parking lots

6

Memos from the Anthropocene

insist our world’s full up

on elegiac despair

5

Recipients meet stagnation

in surreal shapes

& neon kitsch

4

Atomic liquor cocktails,

High Flux ISOTOPE reactor,

stuff of hoop dreams

3

Catch efflorescence

in obelisks, dust, plinths

– leavings as disposal

2

Canyons of clouded

horizons amass with clicks / diodes

switch to Geiger score

1

Modernity foments / For

Sale / Used / Waste flows /

perverse as climate melancholy

*Ekphrastic response to photographs by Brett Leigh Dicks

Samantha Boswell lives in Boorloo/ Perth, Western Australia where the Swan Coastal Plain, Derbarl Yerrigan/ Swan River, and the strange shifts we live with flow into writing. Her recent work appears in Authora Australis Literary Journal, Creatrix, Cuttlefish: Western Australian Poets, the little journal Romance edition, Rough Diamond Poetry, and The Marrow Poetry Journal. 

Instagram @streetswhereilive