short term Impact
Newspaper articles from 1938. From the private collection of Leonard Grossman
Radium Girls PoemWe sat at long tables side by side in a big
dusty room where we laughed and carried on until they told us to pipe down and paint. The running joke was how we glowed, the handkerchiefs we sneezed into lighting up our purses when we opened them at night, our lips and nails, painted for our boyfriends as a lark, simmering white as ash in a dark room. “Would you die for science?” the reporter asked us, Edna and me, the main ones in the papers. Science? We mixed up glue, water and radium powder into a glowing greenish white paint and painted watch dials with a little brush, one number after another, taking one dial after another, all day long, from the racks sitting next to our chairs. After a few strokes, the brush lost its shape, and our bosses told us to point it with our lips. Was that science? I quit the watch factory to work in a bank and thought I’d gotten class, more money, a better life, until I lost a tooth in back and two in front and my jaw filled up with sores. We sued: Edna, Katherine, Quinta, Larice and me, but when we got to court, not one of us could raise our arms to take the oath. My teeth were gone by then. “Pretty Grace Fryer,” they called me in the papers. All of us were dying. We heard the scientist in France, Marie Curie, could not believe “the manner in which we worked” and how we tasted that pretty paint a hundred times a day. Now, even our crumbling bones will glow forever in the black earth. -Eleanor Swanson/2002/Rhapsody in Books Weblog |
the innocence of Radium poemWith α head full of Swiss clockmakers,
she took α job at α New Jersey factory painting luminous numbers, copying the style believed to be found in the candlelit backrooms of snowbound alpine villages. Holding each clockface to the light, she would catch α glimpse of the chemist as he measured and checked. He was old enough, had α kind face and α foreign name she never dared to pronounce: Sochocky. For α joke she painted her teeth and nails, jumped out οn the other girls walking home. In bed that night she laughed out loud and stroked herself with ten green fingertips. Unable to sleep, the chemist traced each number on the face he had stolen from the factory floor. He liked the curve of her eights; the waγ she raised the wet brush to her lips and, with α delicate purse of her mouth, smoothed the bristle to α perfect tip. Over the years he watched her grow dull. The doctors gave up, removed half her jaw, and blamed syphilis when her thighbone snapped as she struggled uρ α flight of steps. Diagnosing infidelity, the chemist pronounced the innocence of radium, α kind of radiance that could not be held by the body of α woman, only caught between her teeth. He was proud of his paint and made public speeches on how it could be used by artists to convey the quality of moonlight. Sochocky displayed these shining landscapes on his walls; his faith sustained alone in α room full of warm skies that broke up the dark and drained his blood of its colour. His dangerous bones could not keep their secret. Laid out for Χ-ray, before a single button was pressed, they exposed the plate and pictured themselves as α ghost, not α skeleton, α photograph he was unable to stop being developed and fixed. -Lavina Greenlaw/1993/Poetry Archive |