Nuclear Family

In the night her whitened toes / cold sole on his calf / between his palms he warms / a slender foot – / twig bones, taut skin.

Jean Van Loon’s father was a metallurgist in an Ottawa lab that contributed to the Manhattan Project. The Geiger counter he brought home exposed her mother’s dinner plate as radioactive. Her childhood friend’s father sold cobalt bombs to the Soviet Union. Unbeknownst even to the family, her mother worked for Canada’s Cold War intelligence service.

Rooted in memory an...