Notes from the Red Zone, by Christina Pacosz, $7.00 paper, 21 pages, Seven Kitchens Press, 2009 (originally published by Seal Press anti-nuclear series, 1983).

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Ron Mohring selected Notes from the Red Zone as the inaugural volume in the ReBound Series for out-of-print chapbooks deserving of a wider audience. It is hard to imagine a more fitting selection. The poems, dedicated to Karen Silkwood, are as timely today as at first release. Good news for readers, but bad for the environment, since despite the Tri-Party Agreement (TPA), as Pacosz notes in the epilogue, "Pollution continues to contaminate the region." In one of the poems Pacosz describes how female ducks may be drab next to brightly plumaged males, but their dullness belies "the muted / thunder at the back of their throats." Pacosz's poems are themselves muted thunder-a noise of powerful witness, then as now.

The chapbook is one poem in eight parts and from the first word, "Yakima," Pacosz grounds her work in the land and the lives of its inhabitants, whether animal, plant or human: "wild carrot shouts," "magpies declare the headlines," land and river offer,

…communal assent for what is not named

     plutonium
     uranium isotopes
     lapping at my feet

     sick civilized worms
     urrowing into bone

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Pacosz inhabits imaginatively and with compassion whatever falls within her vision, a vision not limited by cartographic borders: "Remember this desert / goes all the way to Mexico." The man and woman in an early poem, tall and white versus short and Indian, invoke the violence that has beleaguered this border, since the woman's face is bruised and she is "not sure she can continue / paying the price." Fractured human relationships are therefore emblematic of the price a nuclear power plant exacts on the environment and its inhabitants.

Chronic stress attends the lives of the general population ("whole families lie awake, / stiff in separate beds. No one can get back to sleep") in contrast to the seemingly blasé Hanford security force, who play pinochle or poker then write "worked the shift without incident" in the log before punching out. As they exit into the dawn, "mesas strain / to come together / and make the hard land whole again." Pacosz is a master at reading the lay of the land, both literally and figuratively, and then explicating it poetically. People "don't hear the land / calling to their two-footed, red-blooded warmth." Instead, women find comfort in slogans and in the promise of an afterlife as they "crack and suck / the marrow of their great-great- / great-grandchildren's children."

This shocking image renders explicit how decisions today impact generations to come, echoing the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy that demands every decision be weighed for its effect on the next seven generations. Rather than organizing to activism, as did Karen Silkwood, these women skirt the dangerous truth and offer only a "mute chorus" of lamentation and rationalization: "We have / bills, children to / feed and clothe." The children, though, are being poisoned:

A twelve-year-old boy
reels with lymphoma,
bald beneath the blue mesh cap
advertising doormat spray.
His mother, the neighbors,
her coworkers
look at me
like horses trapped in a barn fire
when I ask,
how long have you lived here?

The answer

all our lives

Thereafter another "red zone" emerges as leitmotif--that of the human heart. Hunched shoulders are "fragile rafters, tentative roofs / over caged hearts." Elsewhere, the speaker's heart "beats fast, a snagged bird, ready / for any threatening gesture…I am alert, a deer, / sniffing the death they carry with them." The image of the deer recalls Marilou Awiakta's writings on Oak Ridge, published shortly before the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island; Awiakta's Awi Usdi, Little Deer, is likewise alert to the threat of power wielded without reverence for life. This life force is strong even in an environment of disease and death. When a young man interrupts his own mating dance to throw clods of dirt at rutting ducks, the speaker's heart

… shudders under red wool,
and there is not enough sun to warm me,
Artemis of the animals, loose
in the red zone, on the brink
of the twenty-first century,
at the close of a millennium of death:

blue whale, Polish Jew, tiger, witch, lion,
sperm whale, whooping crane, black South African,
elk, mountain goat, the women of every country,
slugs in the garden, Indians in Chile, Guatemala,
El Salvador, Tacoma, Detroit, crows in the crops,
rattlesnake, migrant pickers in Hood River, Yakima,
bald eagle, dolphin, timber wolf, the inhabitants
of any ghetto, refugee or concentration camp, seal,
sea otter, fox, coyote,
the genes of the unborn
flooded with purple light
the eye refuses to see.

This then is the heart of the book: damage to one is damage to all. The speaker is almost overwhelmed by anguish and "cannot decipher or delineate / anything" when healing comes from an unexpected source:

A plant,
one of thousands
cultivated in the machine-sowed, tended rows
raises its chemical-prodded
green flag to the evening.
I stoop
and stroke its leaves.
Suddenly

I am
less afraid.

This exchange affirms the symbiosis of species: the same soil, same water feeds and poisons both plant and animal. And yet only the human word says:

here is a wall, there barbed wire,
if you cross the line
you are not me, you are evil.

This is the word
that pulls the trigger.

And again: "Say enemy in some dangerous part of the brain / where the heart does not penetrate / and the word blasts half the human rock. / Say enemy and the heart shivers." This reference to the dangerous part of the brain suggests the oldest, reptilian part of the brain that is geared to react impulsively, for survival. One thinks of the lizard in William Stafford's poem "At the bomb testing site," waiting for history with tense elbows and hands gripping hard on the desert. Pacosz knows that the enemy is born, autochthonous, like Athena "empty-eyed from the head of Zeus," a myth propelled by animosity.

What is the antidote to such violence? The heart itself, whose rhythm is a lulling chant that "does not know lips form the word." Pacosz suggests there must be congruence between the heart and the uttered word, born of commonality of blood and life:

Given time, the heart
could contemplate the enormity,
purify the blood, the word…

And enemy would float to the surface
a fragile boat
built from a fear
of drowning.

This brilliant and heart-wrenching image shows enemy for what it is: a word and construct made buoyant by fear. As readers we can only hope works such as Notes from the Red Zone will keep rising to the surface of the consciousness of many.

Christina Pacosz has been writing most of her life. Her books include Some Winded, Wild Beast (Black and Red, 1985), This Is Not a Place to Sing (West End, 1987), One River (Pudding House, 2001), and Greatest Hits, 1975-2001 (Pudding House, 2002). Raised in a working class Polish family in Detroit, Michigan, she has lived in New York City, the Pacific Northwest, North Dakota, the Carolinas and Alaska. She now lives in Kansas City, Missouri.