Kimberly Kralowec

You’d Think It’s Fever but the Scale Is Wrong

—a personal kind of climate change, causing the globe
to warm. The moon grows redder and farther 

away, chipped off perhaps by asteroid or shifting
plate over plate: the earth’s last meal. I no longer 

trust the outside air. Something erupts from a core
I didn’t know I had—soon I’ll sign my name with heat 

instead of warmly. Could I harness it, turn it off
and on? My paper darkens as I write—melding the  

far with what’s near. The ground shakes as if all
the world’s poets were knowing at once: Elegance 

means the shape of the dried rose—a finch died because
we put food out for it. I hear nothing but snowmelt 

trying to flow. What a place this is. How long
can we think of ourselves as young?

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Kimberly Kralowec is the author of a chapbook, We retreat into the stillness of our own bones (Tolsun Books 2022). Her poetry appears in journals such as wildness, Twyckenham Notes, Nixes Mate Review and The Inflectionist Review and she was recently named a finalist in the River Styx International Poetry Contest and a semi-finalist for the Jane Underwood Poetry Prize. A lawyer by profession, she holds an English degree from Pomona College and lives in San Francisco. Her poetry blog is anapoetics.com.