Plume Quotes

“run in circles as my severed future fries. Hear the siren once and it will change your life. That night I’ll wake transformed into a cockroach, scaling the inside of a reactor dome.”
― Kathleen Flenniken, Plume: Poems

“The orientation video begins with fire and hurricane—familiar, comfortable disaster. Then, with a queer segue, the AWOOGA AWOOGA of commencing reactor meltdown. I sit in my summer suit from Nordstrom, the only new hire today, not dressed for fear in the shape of a mushroom cloud or the end of the human race. The clerk sorts through papers as though this is any work day. I believe in her eye shadow, the orange on her desk, but the siren sounds deep in my lizard brain, in my involuntary heart which has stopped and locked—the way security (explains a calm voice in the video) will lock down the gates and my chicken body”
― Kathleen Flenniken, Plume: Poems

“You’re eighteen. It’s August brim to brim and your father is at the wheel. He points proudly at distant reactors and spires, sun-baked highway and barbed wire, and offers them to you. You’ve waited all your life. A gate patrolman waves you across the threshold into the Cold War world. You grew up downstream, sugared by these winds, while Dad and Carolyn’s Dad and every father you knew disappeared to fuel the bomb. He drives you past canyon buildings like grounded ocean freighters. A dozen miles more and White Bluffs shimmers into view—a ghost town with your very own eyes, the shell of old Hanford High School, sad remnants of abandoned farms. Dad is pointing, but wind and speed carry his voice away. . . .”
― Kathleen Flenniken, Plume: Poems