Prayer of Radiolucence

After I turned forty, I received my first 42 millirem dose of X-rays.

I heated the machine with my uncupped body, tabled my rib cage

to cool shoulders dear as a beloved relative who could no longer see

due to intraocular weather in her eyes. Women in an outer room

awaited bone scans. Backscatter is 5 microrems or .005 millirems.

A dental bitewing X-ray, around 0.5 millirem. Mammogram, 40 to 70.

Do not know about bone scans. Annual background radiation is 300,

higher if we live on a mesa or often fly. Ozone plus uranium decay,

daughters of radon gas.

                                   How about our radiogenic thyroids, butterflies

shimmering with table-salt iodine? Peonies of  bone marrow spun

        rails of flesh in a waiting room of  jacquard chairs,

of  round mirrors and water lilies, paper hydrangeas, African violets.

If  I broke the silence, then I drew the flame of  your sun into my chest.

Unshielded, I entered an inner room to don a rose-colored cotton kimono.

For a minute, I thought of  flying fish roe and forgot its  Japanese name.

What is the risk of carcinogenic harm while estrogen acts on my cells?

Coralline of  the radiology room inside my mouth, the clinical air

exuded an odor of magnolia powder although no one wore it, a scent

riper than radical scavengers of  blackberries. I uttered a prayer

of radiolucence

                      then remembered the word, tobiko.