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 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.

SPINNING

by Shawn Aveningo-Sanders

The latest weather dome has uncovered us from its blanket of unrelenting heat. At last, I can walk the trails near my house and not need the inhaler in my pocket. I let the laundry pile up in order to save the grid for more important things—lamplight, fans, the refrigerator’s hum. I’m wearing a T-shirt I haven’t worn in almost ten years with its rainbowed Love is Love on soft heather gray and Legalize Gay on the back. I still remember crying that day the courts ruled in favor of my daughters’ future weddings. I imagine the celebration in the hearts of Black Americans when the Civil Rights Act was signed, a year before I was born. I was too young to understand the ruling in ’73 but have been grateful for rights afforded to our sisters, our mothers, our friends. Now the Ferris Wheel is spinning in reverse. I watch the unraveling of progress in the name of pseudo-freedom, mock patriotism and the so-called good ole days. And here we stand, hand in hand, left wondering which car will be stuck at the top, once this ride comes to an end.

carnival tickets 

scattered like wildflower seeds

we wait for the rain

Shawn Aveningo-Sanders’ poems have appeared worldwide in literary journals including Calyx, ONE ART, Eunoia Review, Blue Heron Review, Tule Review, Amsterdam Quarterly, About Place Journal, and Snapdragon, to name a few. She is the author of What She Was Wearing, a chapbook that reveals her #metoo secret after forty years. She’s co-founder of The Poetry Box press and managing editor of The Poeming Pigeon. Shawn is a proud mother of three amazing humans and Nana to one darling baby girl. She shares the creative life with her husband in Oregon.