"Kitty Oppenheimer Tends Louis Slotin after an Accident in the Lab"

I hadn't seen Hiroshima myself,
or Nagasaki, though I'd heard Bob Serber's
stories. They seemed like fairy tales or myths —
fables to frighten children, or at best
efforts to cast the inexplicable
in human terms. But then I tended Slotin
his last nine days and saw. Saw him vomit
till his stomach bled. Saw him try to grip
the white enamel bowl in the crotches of his thumbs,
his hands so swollen that his fingers wouldn't bend.
Saw him retch clear strands of spit, green flecks
of bile, too tired to wipe them from his lips.
He hiccuped for ten hours straight. At first
he almost laughed; later we strapped him down
to stop him clawing at his diaphragm.
Blisters grew like toadstools on his hands,
between his fingers, up his arms. The skin
peeled off his chest. His hair came out in clumps.
His liver failed. His kidneys. Bowels blocked.
Blood filled the bedpans. We gave him codeine.
Morphine. Nothing helped. Pain paced his body.
His fingers and his toes turned blue. His face
bloated, blistered, thick as a mask. A rind.
He seemed unconscious — so we had to think.
He might have been a thousand different men.
A hundred thousand. Only, when he died,
no cities burned. Friends grieved. His parents took
a lead-lined coffin back to Winnipeg.

—John Canady