Individual Voices / Natural Forms
Winter, 2006
Brendan Constantine
Dead Boy Sonnet
Do you recall when we were boys of steel
and chased the girls through clouds of DDT?
Our moms would let us play with mercury
and dashed asbestos into every meal.
Those days are lost like cinnamon in rust
or the words just above the fruited plane.
DICHLORODIPHENYLTRICHLOROETHANE
still has enough O's for a boy to trust,
but which of us could pass for a boy now?
Who is left who knows how to poison us
inadvertently, with a parent's love?
There is more cancer in a laughing cow
than in all Chernobyl's apple nimbus.
We can count our deaths, they aren't enough.