Dial Painters | left in the dark
lip, dip, paint. lip, dip, paint.
Mollie and Grace and Katherine and I.
Crucibles sining and faces beaming into the dark of night,
The running joke was how we glowed, Paris green and Mercury white.
Long and dusty tables, laid side by side by side.
The curve of the two, the dash of the five; pushed away and sent to dry
again.
How now, no more tip on the brush?
A flash and a shimmering,
shimmering and glimmering
dash’t against the lips with a metallic blush.
Lip, dip, paint.
Lip, dip, paint.
Nails and lips and cheeks we painted,
fingers and aprons tainted
with the paint as white as ash.
Laughing, lights out in a flash:
How it glowed!
Lip, dip, paint.
Lip, dip, paint.
I quit the watch factory to work in a bank,
and thought I’d gotten class, more money, a rank
a better life, till I lost a tooth in back
and two in front and my jaw filled with sores and sacs.
When we got to court,
Quinta and Grace and Katherine and I.
none could raise her arms
to the oath, and comply.
My teeth were gone by then.
Mollie was the first to fall,
her lower jaw wrapt in a sullen shawl
seperate from her head.
Quinta dropped in twenty-nine,
ballooned, face blown-up in horrific design.
Her children she left behind.
Grace, Pretty Grace Fryer,
laid in her casket with her mourning attire
by the age of thirty-four.
Katherine began in her fourteenth summer,
you know, she longed to become a writer.
Yet plated in radium, her bones burnt brighter,
her manuscript along with them, too.
Still they came,
then more and more.
What was liquid sunshine,
had death laid in store.
Upon my deathbed trembling,
trembling and disassembling.
Like the dials that once graced these hands.
Now, even our crumbling bones
will glow forever in the blackest earth.
Lip, dip, paint.
During World War I, young women were employed at the U. S. Radium Corporation in New Jersey to paint luminous dials on watch faces. They were told that the paint was harmless; and the girls sometimes painted their nails, teeth, and faces for fun.
As rinsing the dull brush was too time-consuming and costly, the women were instructed to point the brushes with their lips.
this poem is dedicated to she who paid with her life.
may all that glimmers from now on be the stars in the night sky, forever and evermore.
-v.
