radioactive man

      the papers started calling me

      Radioactive Man after tests from

      the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

      revealed the highest radiation levels

      in anyone they’d ever screened

      I guess I’m the champion, I joke

      to reporters who come for interviews

      like visitors from another planet

      bulky and brightly awkward

      in white hazmat suits, they look

      like mourners at a Buddhist funeral

      and so I light a cigarette to dangle

      from the corner of my lip and grin

      even eight miles away, in Tomioka,

      the sound of Reactor 4 exploding

      was completely unmistakable,

      so I took my elderly parents south

      to my aunt in Iwaki, who refused

      to even open her door to us because

      she said we were contaminated

      then we tried a temporary shelter

      but it was full, so we came home

      again to the no go zone, and when

      other relatives agreed to take in

      my parents, I stayed behind

      to care for the abandoned animals

      I’ve seen many terrible things:

      cages filled with withered songbirds,

      horses left to starve in their stalls,

      an abandoned puppy that grew

      too big for the chain around its neck

      I rescue as many as I can:

      the dog trapped inside a barn

      for months, who survived by eating

      the dead flesh of starved cattle

      or the feral ostrich so vicious

      the police who border patrol

      the nuclear exclusion zone

      armed with Geiger counters

      nicknamed her The Boss

      all over Tomioka, the animals

      recognize the sound of my truck,

      and come running to meet me

      when I make my daily rounds

      many come to stay with me

      at my family’s old rice farm

      living without water

      or electricity in the ruins

      of the town where I was born

      is sometimes very lonely

      I wait for cancer or leukemia

      and joke to The Boss about

      becoming a superhero through

      a radioactive ostrich bite

      sometimes I think of visiting

      my two kids, who live

      with my ex-wife in Tokyo,

      but then I remind myself

      of the invisible dust coated

      in cesium particles that’s in

      my clothes, my hair, my skin

      I remember I can see my future

      in the sick animals I care for

      in the American Watchmen comics,

      Dr. Manhattan was once tricked

      into believing he’d given everyone

      he ever loved cancer, through

      exposure to his radioactive body

      just the thought of this undid him,

      made him feel so solitary and blue

      he left the earth behind for eons,

      to brood in exile on the moon