Water, heating, is a different beast, a roar
unlike woodland streams–unmusical, a galaxy
of molecules brought to boil, screaming
tiny lobsters (I imagine). We’ve recorded,
and now can testify, microbes twit like finches in alarm,
so why not the H’s and the O’s when forced
to be steam? Even single-celled planktons
broadcast their distress, command their soldiers
to raise chalk shields, while others of their kind
kill themselves not to host a viral invasion.
And so, making tea, I’m listening to electrons
scrabbling at this steel wall, crying out throatlessly,
clinging, doing all they can to stay the way they are.
Like little me’s. Like my life. Heating up.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 19, Issue 4.
D M Gordon is the author of Fourth World and Nightly, at the Institute of the Possible, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award and International Book Award. Phi Beta Kappa, Masters in Music from Boston University, she’s a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow in fiction, and finalist in poetry. She is an editor for Hedgerow Books and at www.dmgordoneditorial.com.
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Susan Okie is a doctor, a poet, and a former Washington Post medical reporter. She received her MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her poem, “Perseid,” was chosen by Michael Collier as the first prize winner in the 2012 Bethesda Poetry Contest.
Judith Montgomery’s poems appear in Prairie Schooner, Cave Wall, and Rattle, among other journals, as well as in several anthologies. Her chapbook, Passion, received the 2000 Oregon Book Award for Poetry; Red Jess (Cherry Grove Collections, 2006) and Pulse & Constellation (Finishing Line Press, 2007) followed. Her second full-length collection, Litany for Wound and Bloom, will appear in 2018 from Uttered Chaos Press.