Radium Girl

Second Honorable Mention (tie) - Lauren Emo

Judge's Citation on "Radium Girl"

The dramatic monologue is ambitious in its exploration of the factory girls suffering from radiation poisoning. I'm compelled by imagery that yokes the dangerous and deadly with the beautiful and nearly surreal, for example: "Any man would want a woman with cheeks / pink and flushed, / covered in radiant dust." The tone does a lot of work for this poem--the contrasting details creates tension, as if beauty (and those watches) is more significant than their lives. The movement between the first and second sections, where the more narrative dramatic monologue shifts into a meditation, was moving: "Pain is beauty / And my bones are brittle brick."

Radium Girl

I paint a wealthy man’s wristwatch
careful to get every knick
just right. Bring the brush
to my lips to soften its bristles
to a sharp point
and slice through
the face of the clock. Divvy up
seven hundred
dollars on my tongue
and keep my head
down as I glow.

And by night, I go dancing.
I light up the floor.
When I twirl round, pearlescent particles
lift from my dress to join
my luminant smile, fluorescent lust.
Any man would want a woman with cheeks
pink and flushed,
covered in radiant dust.
Skin, like freshly fallen snow,
into the night
I glow.

 

Pain is beauty
And my bones are brittle brick

My body resents me
And my blood runs backwards

Because as their pristine wristwatches tick
So.
            does.
                                   our.
                                                         time.

 

The other glowing girls discussed in whispers
how one of us lost her jaw
The Dentist
gingerly ripped it from her face
and still, she lived
another year
and still
she glowed.

We fell apart because
big men bury the truth,
while in a place beside my shining sisters
my mother buries me six feet below,
Out from the Earth,
our anger, simmering, growing.
And I’m glowing, Still.

 

Perhaps down the line if a girl my age shares my rage she’ll write a poem for all the girls,

all the girls, made to glow.

 

 

 

The Radium Girls were female factory workers from 1917-1935 who painted face dials with radioactive material. Unbeknownst to the danger of working with radium, they would regularly ingest paint in order to narrow the tip of their brushes, all contracting radiation poisoning, slowly and painfully killing them. It wasn't until 1938, when a dying radium worker named Catherine Wolfe Donohue successfully sued the Radium Dial Co. over her illness, setting a significant precedent for people's rights in the workplace.