Arsenic Bulletin: Q & A
What is the area of concern?
Around our house, fields. We’d run out into
wheat and break off ripe stalks, open the berries
How can I find out what’s in the water?
in our hands, chew them into a gum.
After harvest, we rode our pony
Is it always dangerous?
through the stubble. We ate red Jello
out of the box for the thrill of that sour,
held our nose
Should my well be tested?
in the backseat of the car
at the gas station. All year
How much is too much?
the fields lay open to the sky and below.
At what point should we be concerned?
All those years we woke to the fields around us.
What should we look for?
Ghosts rose around us like vapor.
I’m calling to be tested.
We thought
Please.
we would live forever. We thought
Hurry.
we would never leave.
Note: In 2001, the EPA published a new arsenic rule setting the maximum level for arsenic in drinking water at 10 parts per billion (ppb). Many areas of Michigan have higher groundwater arsenic levels, and the three counties of Michigan’s Thumb (where my home town is located) tested at more than 50 ppb in 2003. Arsenic exposure is known to cause short-term and long-term health effects, including certain types of cancer, and there is talk of a “Cancer Corridor” in the Thumb. In the early 2000s, these findings caused a great deal of public discussion and concern.
Fields and Tides: After Chemo
One day, whiskers reappeared in my father’s ears,
like crabgrass through a crack in the pavement.
What had been washed from his body? What
was still rooted there? And re-igniting?
Imagine canoes in the dark caves of veins,
ferrying named and heavy metals
that leave their mark in the absence
of mark: the death of any growing thing.
Luminescent etchings, strange smells
rising quickly from the roommate who died
an hour ago behind the hospital curtain.
Imagine the body as a field of fragments,
continuously pieced and piecing, a sea
of swellings and tides, of absorptions
and release. Respiration, digestion—
words slapping down in the mouth
like the ends of waves.
Imagine the earth as a body, its salts
and heavings. Threaded with rivers.
Where the dead live again and metals
move in increments. The earth raises
a cup; we drink of it. Press your ear
to the ground and hear your own blood move.
