It was the watches I wanted, those radium dials
Glowing like bomb sights
When I cupped my palm.
Wisp
Of radioactivity—the hour hand;
Nether-wisp—the second.
For weeks my mother worked the counter at Kresge’s—
Her faded pink smock
As tight as a nurse’s—
As she laid out the bands in their false
Reptilian shines—
The cowboy tans, the avocado greens. This
Was Radium City
And my mother, Marie
Curie, scientist of jewels and hams,
The chunks of meat slapped
Like memory into the knife
And the iridescence sliced to pieces as thin
As winter sky, shaved uranium.
I had to stack them high to tongue the plugs
Of fats, the permeating salts.
The roll breaking in my hands like a ball of
Glass. And the stench of drugstore
Popcorn, its second perfume
Mingling with what my mother wore
As she shoveled out
The bags like spent carnival fortunes.
More money was one we wasted on ourselves.
Or new drapes.
One last snap of the Tupperware over the nightly concoctions
No one ever wanted to eat.
I’d go away and ponder mono/stereo
For the extra buck
In the lp bins, or keep an eye walking
Home for Tarzan—
Weissmuller in a shiny Olds or Cadillac.
And then wait out the summer hours pitching
A 9-inning game
In a chalk box the side of the house.
Ferguson Jenkins for 7 or so,
Then Abernathy for the submarine.
Next door a neighbor would peg out his pet
Skunk and I’d listen as it roiled
With thirst
Or hunkered under diving blue jays,
Their cobalts dipped
In the mouth of the sun
And set out like hour hands
To the shadowed yard.
The Cubs would lose.
Weissmuller never show.
The Mexican kids from Dempster would threaten
To beat my ass into the street
And leave me there
Dented and ringing as a hubcap,
Another rat-faced kid
Waiting for his mother to come home.
Pink smock.
Ham in a pocket.
Singing beyond the genius of the meats,
The radium dials, the gems,
The gold fish
And guppies in their clouds of hopelessness.
The kiss, the mother’s kiss, put like a cure to the child’s face.
M.P. Carver is a poet and visual artist from Salem, MA. She is Director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, miCrO-Founder of Molecule: a tiny lit mag, and teaches at Salem State University. Her work has been published in Rattle, Mantis, and Nixes Mate, among others. She has received funding or fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Essex Community Foundation, the T.S. Eliot Foundation, and Disquiet International. In 2022 her poem “You & God & I” was awarded the New England Poetry Club’s E.E. Cummings Prize. Her chapbook, Selachipmorpha, was published by Incessant Pipe in 2015, and a chapbook with Lily Poetry Review Books, Hard Up, is available now.
More at mpcarver.com.
Ọna Anosike is a writer, editor, and literary leader whose work sits at the intersection of storytelling, community building, and educational design. She is a published writer and the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the TONIC, a literary journal dedicated to amplifying bold, original storytelling from underrepresented voices. Under her leadership, the TONIC has grown into a curated space for emerging and established writers alike. She has served as a writing instructor, both at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and was chosen as a judge for the 2025 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Prize for Undergraduate Literary Magazines.
Her editorial and mentorship work is grounded in a decade of experience as an educational consultant and program specialist, designing inclusive learning systems for schools and nonprofits nationwide. She is currently completing a literary short story collection and a young adult novel, with early agent interest. She holds an M.S.Ed. in Education Entrepreneurship from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University, and a B.A. in English from Northeastern University. She is also the founder of Inkwell Montessori, an authentic Montessori school opening in Somerville, Massachusetts, in September 2026.
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