by Laura Shovan
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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.
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 Elementary, Takedown, and A Place at the Table (Sydney Taylor Notable), written with Saadia Faruqi. Recent poems appear in Gargoyle, Greening the Earth, and Innisfree Poetry Journal. She teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
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.
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 Elementary, Takedown, and A Place at the Table (Sydney Taylor Notable), written with Saadia Faruqi. Recent poems appear in Gargoyle, Greening the Earth, and Innisfree Poetry Journal. She teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts.