Life is a Dirty Bomb
My skin is a field of radioactivity.
We have to cut you open to save your life
is what I hear. Yes this is how
my largest organ will betray me.
Along the expanse
of a three-alarm ultraviolet burn,
Dr. Buck steadies his eyes
upon this malignant malfunctioning body
before directing a scalpel
toward the uneven borders of a mole,
notches of damaged DNA
ballooning into an explosion.
They patch me up, back
into an oven of wicked humidity
where the local meteorologist
recommends a slather
of SPF infinity sunscreen.
Keith Gaboury earned a M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College. While his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such literary journals as After Happy Hour Review, Five:2:One Magazine, The Birds We Piled Loosely, and New Millennium Writings, Keith has been rejected from The Boston Review, The Paris Review, and Poetry. He also co-founded a social justice-themed online literary magazine, Words Apart. While spending his days as an early childhood educator, he spends his nights writing poetry in San Francisco, California.
