Radium Girls

after emily skaja

yong-yu huang

In this factory of crime scenes, we break at noon. You tell me it’s safe. That to make art

is to excise it from the body. I learn that I am only in love with time until my lungs sluice

into the sink. The groundwater beneath my bed. Every accident I collect in a bouquet of

dark feathers. I scatter them in the parking lot, by the heap of discarded hair. My hands

more radiant than any bombshell blonde. To glaze in a kiln & stare back at myself, the

rounded eye of a blackbird. I die slower on-screen than in real life, move only in

increments of glass. Crisp seconds. A pool of thinning paint. When I return I watch the

gears rust, caught between black light & a painting. In this one, the hands are melting

faster than any gunfight. Someone says, I’d kill for time & this must be some universal

truth. Greased hands. Disassemblage of the body. The way slick metal distorts the skin

seems so palatable under duress. I don’t know why the bells are ringing brighter in my

ears. If I unslung my jaw, these machines would crumble into dust––enough to scatter

across the pockmarked face of the asphalt. Somewhere outside, the children wind their

watches. The birds molt above the roof on loop. I lick my fingers clean.