by Erika Luckert
A century ago, the whole city,
facing the summer heat,
would spill out of their apartments,
carrying their beds, their blankets, their sheets
onto Central Park’s great lawn where,
under the cool of the open sky, they’d sleep.
Now the waves of rolling blackouts
are the only thing that interrupts
the whine of window AC units
perched high above the streets.
They say that soon Manhattan
will be a shallow part of the sea.
Further north, even the frost
heaves, and the strata of silt
and ice swells into peaks
as millenniums collapse and thaw.
In the world’s coldest city, just last week
a team of scientists announced a birth
from a crater in the earth, a prehistoric foal
just two months old and perfectly preserved—
its hooves, its tail, even the hairs of its nostrils
which, forty-thousand years ago, flared
into colder air. The crater where the foal
was found is flooding with water now,
forming a lake the locals call
the mouth of hell.
ERIKA LUCKERT is a poet, writer, and educator. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA in Poetry, and a recipient of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize. Originally from Edmonton, Canada, Erika is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. www.erikaluckert.com.
Mass Thermal Anomalies was edited by Suha Tariq and Julia Bortolussi. It can be found in Augur Magazine Issue 6.1.
