ash

ash floats down and curls around
the pencil-sketch silhouettes
of New England trees.
it fills worn ruts in roads
and piles upon the asphalt plains
of suburbia, where above each neighborhood
clouds loom dark and tall
like sick tenements.

there is glass pressed against my face
and the faces of my neighbors,
who stand huddled in their homes
staring through windows towards the sallow air
where a few last hints of warmth
disappear behind dense black flakes
of human transgression.

the sky flutters gray to the ground,
and drags down with it
a chorus of eyes.

my brother gazes beside me;
does radiation smell? he asks,
cutting through the ambient drone
of our neighborhood’s harmonizing generators.
I don’t know, I say.

daddy, dad---
dad, does radiation smell?