atomic comets litter the ashen landscapes of my American dreams
wish I may, wish, with all my might, for uranium-plutonium rocks to stay crystallized in the stars.
no longer have to look up obituaries to find little boys’ and fat man’s smoldering tomb stones: they orbit through front-paged print like steely marble boulders.
when I look up, I see graveyards plotted out on inky skies as permanent as constellations— of radiation lesions chiseled into waxy expanses of foreign skins,
glycerin tears glued to the cheeks of candles,
wishes wasted on celestially confettied cakes.

***
in my youth I aspired to blow as hard as an army of wolves:
with the force of a fire-fighter’s hose:
to choke flames and pierce through smoke: to spot
the greeny-hue of a star across murky cosmos:
to wish away these nuclear dreams.

McKenzie McDonald is an 18 year-old poet from Ottawa where she studies Undeclared Arts. She has become so dependent on metaphors and espresso shots that she basically speaks in memes at double-speed.