We were instructed to point the brush with our lips
––Grace Fryer, a dial-painter for The Radium Luminous Materials Corporation, 1930
1.Glow
Twirling the paintbrush in our mouths to sharpen the point glow-in-the-dark watches airplane dials clocks in the company darkroom our glow-in-the-dark cheeks necks hands our radium tongues constellations of luminous dust drifting as we walk night streets glow nails and eyelids glow lips magic for our sweetheart’s dance clubs and gin rickey bee’s knees and jazz forward and a tap back and a tap sax and trumpet swivel those heels girls in and out swing those arms decayed spines a mass of sores in our mouths gangrene and rotted jaws they wait in the currents of tomorrow now we’re fireflies glow worms click beetles shining blue-green and the stars they have nothing on us.
2. Attorneys for United States Radium Corporation Take Depositions from Former Dial Painters, 1932
Q: How often did you put the paintbrush in your mouth?
Until our voices shimmered like our bones.
Q: What does your dentist say?
Men go wild for splendid teeth.
Q: How frequently did pieces of your jaw fall out?
Q: Weren’t you told not to put the brush in your mouth?
Q: Didn’t you stay so you could buy corsets, ribbons, and pearls?
Q: Is this condition permanent or temporary?
Crushed vertebrae. Mutilated nose.
Q: Don’t you realize your claims are invalid and illegitimate?
Q: Don’t you know your illness is arthritis, streptococcic poisoning, tuberculosis, syphilis?
Q: Isn’t it true that no one ever told you or any other employee that radium wouldn’t hurt them?
Sarcoma of eyes, chin, neck, hip. Jaw a stump.
Q: Did the company not provide picnics with ice cream cones?
Q: What did you put in your hope chest?
3. Mollie in Bed, Several Months Before Her Death from Radiation Poisoning
3:00 pm floats away in a balloon. Sunday is a silhouette. A flapper, Gramps at the Plate in the Saturday Evening Post. Eddie, my boy, craves chemistry: alcohol lamps, beakers, flasks, test tubes. I worry him back to his old magic shows. Where is his top hat and wand? Chemistry is magic, he says—no sneaky tricks. Trickery, I say, is how we survive.
Three-year-old Mary is spinning top, paper windmill, motion cascade. In my room, only her hand moves, stroking Raggedy Ann’s red yarn hair. Bathing beauty and beach ball, bridge night, boy with baby carriage. Time jigsaws me here. All the vanished pieces.My husband, George, his touch on my face. The factory inside my body remembers his mouth, tongues twinning in lust. The factory inside my body remembers my skin split open when his fingernail brushed it as he fumbled at massage. What is pain but a conveyer belt moving bits of jawbone from here to there?
Once I saw the Levitation of Princess Karmac. I float like that princess. These dreams between my children and my skin, the stitching getting looser. Phosphorous, potassium, lithium, sodium.Eddie’s Chemcraft kit promises: Amusing and Mystifying chemical tricks! My body has its promises, too. Heaven’s only a ring toss away.
4. 88
I wish I could persuade you to defer publishing a paper on the subject of radium necrosis.
––Arthur Roeder, president of the United States Radium Corporation
5. Their Bones in the Ground Won’t Do What’s Expected
Edna refuses to stop shimmering. Katherine’s bones multiply like aphids, filling every girl’s hope chest. Hazel crumbles, but her jawbone reconstructs. Osteocytes turbo signaling, collagen armies. Jaw as war club–– hanging bells, mink fur, feathers. Irene: dagger, sword. Peg’s bones crave beauty for her house on the railroad tracks. They become chimes with sea glass, geodes, beads. Dangle above the cramped porch, feeling wind and sky water. Feeling sun. Marie: infinite Charleston. Even hardpan yields to these dancing bones. Helen’s bones are eternally dolled up: cloche hats, high heels with bows, strings of pearls. Grace: eye sockets as aperture, little round lamps for an eternity of books. Mollie, Annette, Pearl. Bones collaborate with Dante and there they are: company lawyers and doctors, executives. In the 8th Circle, of course: flames, boiling tar. And music. An eternity of kangling, human femur as horn, blowing death and ruin to him and him and him, to all those doomed, drowning men.
