Enewetak-atol, Marshalleilanden

Runit Island, part of the Enewetak Atoll, is home to the Tomb, a dome-shaped concrete repository of radioactive topsoil. For one of her video poems, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner (b. 1989, Marshall Islands) climbed to the top of the Tomb to lament the toll of a midcentury U.S. nuclear-weapons testing program that detonated no fewer than sixty-seven bombs in the Marshall Islands. The Tomb is built atop a monumental crater left by the detonation of “Cactus,” the code name for one of the last bombs tested. Over time, what was intended as an impermeable container of lethal material has begun to degrade, “its surface cracking like leather left out in the sun” (Farrier 2020, 188).

C.S.H.