My poem “Ray Cats” has been published in the new edition of Bombay Gin from Naropa University. Here’s a copy of the poem below.

Ray Cats

The half life of our waste is longer 
than the span of our language.
In 10,000 years, long after the American flag 
has fallen and the breath of the last English speaker
has evaporated into the air, our nuclear byproducts 
will be more than 50% potent, still toxic beneath
the sands of Nevada, where suburban civilization 
will sprawl, then ebb.

How will we warn the heirs to our radiation
in a language yet to be uttered? To answer,
scientists and linguists created Nuclear Semiotics: 
a study into the universal signification 
of danger and fear.

Bastide and Fabbri proposed breeding Ray Cats:
a species that glows ominously when exposed 
to radiation. Fabulists and artists would be tasked 
to create a mythology of the illuminated cat 
as nuclear harbinger, knowing stories and sculpture 
survive well past the life of the culture in which
they were first imagined.

When I see Charley staring blankly at a wall
I wonder if he’s transfixed by an isotopic decay
only he can see. Those glowing yellow eyes
trying to tell me about something invisibly
denaturing my DNA. When he dashes through 
the house at 3 AM, can he hear some kind of 
high pitched geiger counter racing, telling me to
run? When he begs me to rub his belly, only
to claw and bite my hand, is it the nitrates
in my hot dog? the aluminum in my deodorant?
the particulates of smog seeping into the room?
I try to translate the cuneiform Charley scratches 
down my arms. The marks puff red in a warning
I cannot read.

Image Credit: Henriëtte Ronner-Knip “The Young Artist” Image courtesy of Artvee