Current Exhibitions

The Vocabulary of Heat

By Amy Irish

 I thought I knew pyrotechnics.

 Forbidden sparks catching in a state

 built of kindling. Fire so wild

 we destroy even more

 to contain the contagion.

 Inhaling smoke and cinders.

 And long-term water shortages

 drying all the way down the aquifer

 to our heat-stroked cells.

 But now extremes crack open the dictionary

 to words too hot to handle.

 Like pyrocumulonimbus,

 when a firestorm cloud is formed

 by thermals rising from fire.

 120 degrees flown in on a jet stream

 so the power cables melt

 and the roads buckle

 and the flesh of the trees ignites.

 Or like the anticyclone that forms,

 the sky a whirling dervish dome

 that traps hot air, intensified

 to the point of lightning.

 I know we are headed for megadrought,

 for the funerals of failed grids

 that die trying to keep us alive.

 I can stretch to grasp the feedback loop

 such heat creates, the greenhouse

 within a greenhouse effect.

 But then I learn of the cryo-seism,

 sounding deceptively frozen.

 In Alaska, glaciers melt so fast

 they are seismic events, ice shearing

 and falling to the tune of a 2.7 magnitude

 on a single day.

 With such words to learn, my mouth

 goes dry, starts to smolder.  

 I struggle with language smoking

 like ash and cinder,

 unable to choke it down.

 But I shouldn’t be forced

 to swallow such extremes—

 now is the time to spit

 them out, fight the fire

 with every fiber,

 before the whole world burns.