In the middle of the disaster nothing bad had happened to me
by Emily Bludworth de Barrios
In the middle of the disaster nothing bad had happened to me
What do Cairo, Houston, and Caracas have in common?
I was like a plastic nougat petrochemicals smeared all over me
Cheerful fires off-gassing Cheerful plumes of smoke pumping up
in the atmosphere Don’t laugh The mall was like a diamond
I don’t care if you believe me Back then we believed in the
power of our perfect money The sound of the word dollar was like
a lollipop lolling around in our mouths Can’t you feel it, too?
First my father then my husband using machinery to extract
oil up from the earth Come out come out Up from the ocean shelf
The Permian Basin The North Sea Off the shore of And off the shore of
And on the shores of the world’s deepest lake In Russia Alaska Australia
Venezuela Louisiana Egypt In one part of the Sahara is an ancient graveyard
filled with fossilized bones of ancient whales Architecture of ribs Architecture
of ancient life you can stand inside (But you can never be a slab of ancient
whale gliding through a pure ocean) (Ancient ocean encrusted with mussels
as if with diamonds) In the Texas Hill Country 100 million years ago
an ocean sifted gently Another ancient dried-up ocean Hiking I found
a stone mollusk And a second mollusk Then a mollusk as big as my hand Dizzy
in a column of 100 million years 100 million years is a long tall column What lasts?
In March, 36 thousand gallons of drilling fluid were leaked into the rock formation
underneath the Blanco River “Oops” The Trinity Aquifer Well-water
thick as milk, and brown with slurry The shores of time The ocean erodes time
Gently sloshing First my grandfathers Then my father Then
my husband Tending the machines that convert one form of petroleum
to another Off-gassing a torch into the night sky
Towing a chemical barge into the Ship Channel That grim gray
city-like stretch of pipes and points and pure-white domes How do you build
an oil pipeline across the ocean floor? I don’t know, but my father knows
(Once in 1994 he brought home a tape of film from the sea floor . . . . . . . .
the mouth of the pump . . . . . . artificial light in the complete dark . . . . . .
nothing . . . . . nothing . . . . . a large fish . . . . . . particles . . . . . . vastly salty, empty, and wet
And the machinery and the secret filth spilling out . . . . ) The mall was like a diamond
Ritualistically on our 13th birthdays our mothers took us to the manicure salon
Hold my hand Massage my fingers Moisten clip sand lacquer
The special chemicals made in the vats (nail polish remover made from toluene)
(the same chemical that burned in the ITC chemical fire) (a dark plume that lasts for days)
(alerts the public to their secret filth) On our 13th birthdays And biweekly thereafter
Clear gloss A crescent moon Off-white ends “A French manicure” is what I typically picked
Or a clear colorful varnish which shone like a rainbow in the light (like oil in a puddle)
(I think of the firemen who don special suits to enter the chemical fires)
(I think of the women who work in a boxy room in a strip mall breathing solvents
Scrubbing solvents from their skin after dipping each of my fingers into a small white vat)
The mall was like a diamond An atrium of glass Like a well-appointed cage
The stores trafficked in the most convincing lies . . . . . . . Here you will be an explorer . . . .
Here an apothecary . . . . . . Sail down the Amazon River and shake a rain stick . . . .
Shake a rain stick . . . . What is that exactly? Nobody knows Didn’t you love
The Bombay Company? Almost black, lacquered look of expensive mahogany wood
Unapologetically in those gushing years we wanted to look expensive and correct
It wasn’t a fashion of goodness, morality, fairness, or justice The stores
were like plotlines of a book We were the main characters It was as if
we were in the midst of doing glamorous things or emotional things
We were imagining ourselves characters living some meaningful lives
What we wanted then was glamour campy glamour, or a glamourized version
of our ordinary lives Nowadays people have more particular tastes
All the time humankind growing more wise and less wise A length of string
manipulated into different shapes Back then we believed in the power
of our perfect money and the veracity of our perfect lives
What do Cairo, Houston, and Caracas have in common? Looking around you now
What can you touch that does not contain oil?
They say oil is the remains of ancient organisms They say oil is the fault of big companies
or maybe we should recycle better, and more The government fingers its unwritten regulations
like a terrible moral failing Seeds the future with microscopic particles of plastic
In the middle of a disaster nothing bad had happened to me
The mall was like a diamond What can I touch that does not contain oil?
First my grandfathers Then my father Then my husband with phone calls
casting invisible strings across the world casting lines between the numbers
in this bank and the numbers in that bank Lines pumps drill bits sunk costs
fixed costs acreage The geologist who loves deep time manipulates the program
makes a map and a graph and shows the investors where to use the new technology
“Fracturing bedrock formations” Like a terrible moral failing Whose?
Published on March 3, 2022