Half-Lives by Carol Quinn

State tests found more than 65,000 children in the city
with dangerously high blood-lead levels from 1993 to 2013.

………………………1

Even Ovid knew it was love’s antidote—

the arrow meant for Daphne’s heart
or the sling-bullet, howling with
its own wound into the horde

beyond a wall.
…………………….By helicopter searchlight

this city could be the one the poet longed
for in exile: storefront temples, decay-
ing masonry, one hortus conclusus after

another as someone runs down an alley,
trying to get away.

………………………2

Divine it from the hour of callings
and estrangement, from paintings
by Goya and Caravaggio:

the chiaroscuro shock of light
as Saint Peter gives up his friend
to the glinting, loricate night.

Meanwhile, Saturn devours another son.
In white paint, in pearls and grays:
the metal associated with a deposed god

(as well as harvests, melancholy,
colic, cognitive deficits, a lack
of impulse control…)
…………………………And so that god was banished

to the farthest known world,
or his chariot ran the widest circuit, as it
was lead—
………………..which Goya ground for his ceruse,

saving the black paint for visions
that later appeared on his walls.

………………………3

In Baltimore
molten metal plummets
from the Phoenix
Shot Tower into ice

water: ordnance for
the coming war.
Lead will pass
through the bodies

of soldiers. It will lodge
in trees at the edge
of a battlefield
the way it once collected

in the bones of artists;
the way it now collects
in the blood of children
who stand on street corners

like trees at the periphery
of a war
no one remembers
anymore.

………………………4

A needle tipped with diamond
dips into the dark. I say I’ll go
through fire, and I’ll go through fire,
sang Eleanora Fagan, as she was known

when she was a girl in Sandtown—

or Lady Day, as she would be known
everywhere else.
………………………She can still be heard
through painted window screens

that bring privacy and rustic scenes
to blocks in Baltimore where no trees grow.

Intro follows outro. In “Strange Fruit”
Frankie Newton’s trumpet skips like a stone
or a siren. The M.E. insists the death
of Freddie Gray was not an accident.

What is the quality of your intent?
asked Thurgood Marshall, also once
a child here.
…………………It’s easier to test for lead

in soil, paint, the extant aqueducts
of fallen empires, or water in
the drinking fountains of city schools.

On a test swab, a chip of white paint
becomes a bright smear of blood.
A map of aggravated assault matches
the density of lead in the city

like a shadow. In his infancy,
Freddie Gray had six times the lead

in his blood as the amount the CDC
would have called “concerning.”
Y’all show up when the cameras
are rolling, someone says to no one

in particular. Where were you before?

………………………5

A crowd gathers for another vigil.
A red-gold drone hovers overhead.

It could be the Tree of Life
or Mars in retrograde.
…………………………..It could be a heresy
about to strike out of the blue.

The drone goes with the crowd
like the lead-poisoned genius of a city,

reducing them to chiaroscuro
and feed—
……………..but the audience back home can’t see

the passing statues of generals
and night patrollers, or imagine the plinths

without their idols (some in the crowd
have begun to dream of the bare pedestals),

the paint stripped from the walls,
the weapons drawn
a final time—

………………….and all the other offerings
of the city, which waits

like a marble altar for its sacred fire.

Carol Quinn’s poetry and prose have appeared in Poetry Daily, Copper Nickel, The American Literary Review, 32 Poems, The Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, River Styx, Colorado Review, The Emily Dickinson Journal, and other publications. She teaches literature, creative writing, exposition, and world folklore at Towson University in Maryland. Her first book of poems, Acetylene, won the Cider Press Review Book Award.