Radiant Marie Curie (1867 –1934)
A soft blue glow.
The glass vial of radium salts transmits joy, like a distant sun or a luminous dial. She likes to keep it by her bed, always. In the evening a moth at the window taps out a syncopated message, perhaps a warning, gamma, gamma, gamma. At night she is the moth bumping against the soft blue glow, pulled to the point from which all things radiate, to the spontaneity of atomic nuclei collapsing. She lets the splendid beams spread over her. In the day she goes downstairs to the backyard, the laboratory shed, puts on her smock with the holes where the salts burn through. She is radiant. She fills another notebook, her fingers barely register the pen, their tips scarred hard.
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