walked home from night
class through sticky air; i’m used to this i grew up in memphis, its sept. weather just followed me here, like an inherited trait – no poem til late – poemizing, teaching poetry, i keep acting like all this is some- how important, like anyone will get hurt if i don’t. we call it doing our duty, maybe, we call it one day at a time; 1st things 1st; walk don’t run til the water reaches you knees, when you won’t be able to any- way. our brains won’t let us see our- selves as non-exempt: it will always happen to somebody else: e. africa, not e. kansas: like the somali region, where people dig into dry riverbeds, hoping for leftover water; woman who lost 1 cow, 20 goats, 5 sheep: “it rained only 5 days, very small showers; not enough to grow grass” [“o.m.g. he’ll be telling us about starving llamas next, l.o.l., snicker”] (but the title is ironic – it’s a verse chronicle, not a “poem”) i see where someone could have inhabited venus once, if someone had been around: soil full of minerals & vitamins, temperate shallow freshwater oceans (where the fishing was good), any kind of proof of life you want could be there, tho something happened then followed close upon, surprised the – like a hella herculaneum, suddenly went hot & found out it was near its sun, sweltering or “hellish,” the word, so anybody there did not go unextincted; but that was volcanoes, not smokestacks so we try to walk in stickiness that turns into amber as we move, scanning our messages, while we can’t not focus on swishing sounds, polka dots in trees, the geologic times will have their day. so we need more missions & models, more rorschach tests to determine con- tingency plans, to con- jure volcanoes spewing green lava that takes root as soon as it cools, ash that turns into rain clouds, or flying carpets to extract u.s. citizens. meanwhile, paper sez “indonesia looks like mars” – proof of the existence of trees on mars, since the ones in indonesia burn
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |