Angela Sorby
Heat Dome
It’s humbling,
how my brother’s chickens
know to dunk their heads in a bowl
of water on hot days.
They’re efficient
without overthinking:
if they dream,
they forget the plot.
106 degrees in Seattle
thanks to our carbon stamp,
and yet the chickens
hold us blameless,
as do the trees, and the glaciers—
and (obviously) the dogs,
as if some God
overloaded the earth
with more forgiveness than we deserve,
or can even picture,
as if thinking itself
were an intellectual failure.
Our bodies are mostly water
that can’t slosh past
the blood-brain barrier
so we’re stuck
with ideas too big
to ferry us, or flood us,
or cleanse us,
unlike the chickens
processing grandly
towards the ice water bowl.
No wonder their eggs
are closed white and brown
contiguous surfaces,
tiny possible
worlds laid outside
of consciousness.
I can’t wrap my head
around eggs this fresh–
they foam when fried,
and taste of grasses greener
than any plant left
in the world we’re burning alive.
Angela Sorby reads “Heat Dome”
Angela Sorby is a poet and literary critic; her most recent poetry collection is The Sleeve Waves, which won the Felix Pollak prize from the University of Wisconsin Press. She teaches at Marquette University in Milwaukee.