Everything Counts
By Barry Ballard

everything is recorded, every stark
negative is stored like a shaman's jaguar
gone haywire, like a detonator
with a clock strapped to the evergreen, the bark,
and the clean breeze caressing them on the remote
Bikini Islands. A history covered
in white ash, the shock wave of our perverse
choices like the anesthetic stilling Hope,

like heat escaping the lung's last day. And
though it bathes and scrubs its rusting metal deck,
we feel the cists growing under its sleeves,
the brain cells of five-week-pregnancies banned
from unfolding their quilt of dreams, the death-
fields later, after years and years of deformity.

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