{"id":1237,"date":"2016-10-24T08:00:46","date_gmt":"2016-10-24T15:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/?p=1237"},"modified":"2016-10-22T09:35:13","modified_gmt":"2016-10-22T16:35:13","slug":"chernobyl-nights-by-mack-w-mani","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/?p=1237","title":{"rendered":"Chernobyl Nights by Mack W. Mani"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1238\" src=\"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/Pripyat_Ferris_Wheel.jpg\" alt=\"pripyat_ferris_wheel\" width=\"1024\" height=\"683\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/Pripyat_Ferris_Wheel.jpg 1024w, http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/Pripyat_Ferris_Wheel-300x200.jpg 300w, http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/Pripyat_Ferris_Wheel-768x512.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Summer in the exclusion zone,<br \/>\ndays spent exploring the forgotten city,<br \/>\nhiking among new timbers growing<br \/>\nwild among abandoned buildings,<br \/>\ncamped out each night<br \/>\nin a different derelict place.<\/p>\n<p>Those soft and quiet Chernobyl nights,<br \/>\nspent together in our little canvas tent,<br \/>\nall hot breath and sweaty sleeping bags.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d expected a mutant wilderness<br \/>\nand was proven wrong each day<br \/>\nby roe deer, spotted eagle,<br \/>\nand endless pine &amp; larch<br \/>\nto where it was easy to forget<br \/>\nthere was a world out there<br \/>\nbeyond the forest.<\/p>\n<p>Some two hundred people<br \/>\nlive here year-round,<br \/>\na sparse few having migrating<br \/>\nin since the accident,<br \/>\nbut most simply having never left<br \/>\nthe shadow of the old reactor.<\/p>\n<p>Once, we traded a group of<br \/>\nGerman hikers the last of our<br \/>\npeanut butter for two thin joints,<br \/>\nand stayed up all night long<br \/>\nlooking at art books and laughing<br \/>\non the floor of the cultural center,<br \/>\nyou smiled and said something like,<br \/>\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153H.R. Geiger Counter\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<br \/>\nand I knew I was in love.<\/p>\n<p>But there is a certain<br \/>\nkind of stillness here,<br \/>\nwith time not exactly forgot<br \/>\nbut held to a looser second,<br \/>\ncausing minutes to unravel<br \/>\ninto days into weeks into<br \/>\nthe first russets of autumn.<\/p>\n<p>And when I ask if you&#8217;ll come back,<br \/>\nto the yellow-rusted ferris wheel<br \/>\nand little elephant slide,<br \/>\nto the empty public pool<br \/>\nand tore up library,<br \/>\nyou simply shrug and look<br \/>\noff towards the sunset.<\/p>\n<p>They are beautiful here,<br \/>\ndespite the desolation<br \/>\n\u00e2\u20ac\u201cand because of it.<\/p>\n<h6>Photo by\u00c2\u00a0Shanomag (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons<\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Summer in the exclusion zone, days spent exploring the forgotten city, hiking among new timbers growing wild among abandoned buildings, camped out each night in a different derelict place. Those soft and quiet Chernobyl nights, spent together in our little canvas tent, all hot breath and sweaty sleeping bags. I&#8217;d expected a mutant wilderness and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1237"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1240,"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1237\/revisions\/1240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}