Tuesday, August 27, 2024

HEAT DOME FORECAST AS A SCENE FROM A ROMANCE NOVEL

by Laura Shovan


Illustration by Alex Kiesling for “What a Heat Wave Does to Your Body,” The New Yorker, August 25, 2023.


“Heat dome builds in central US, forcing some schools to close.” —Scripps News, August 26, 2024


The atmosphere hangs poised above me.
It licks its moist lips, heating the space 
between its expanding dome
and my sweating body. I broil
with the intensity of want—to be human
is to consume. The heat sinks down, 
pressing its bulging temperatures
into my vulnerable places. 
The pressure builds in unbearable waves.
A little death is worth it, I tell myself, 
wishing the brute would finish already.


Laura Shovan is Pushcart Prize-nominated poet whose work appears in journals and anthologies for children and adults. Books include Mountain, Log, Salt, and Stone (Harriss Poetry Prize), The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson ElementaryTakedown, and A Place at the Table (Sydney Taylor Notable), written with Saadia Faruqi. Recent poems appear in GargoyleGreening the Earth, and Innisfree Poetry Journal. She teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts.