Sara J Grossman

Heatwave

Pollen drips,
sky flops 

to the ground.
Everything 

eventually lies
down. This is 

what the temperature
teaches today 

as the air heaps
with the just-cooled 

status of living.
Each spring arrives earlier 

than the last
and maybe the plants 

are learning to adapt,
my brother says. 

In the before that my child
will not remember 

breathable air bloomed
even sideways. 

There was always
enough. Rocks 

fail, it turns out,
and what we gave to the mud 

wasn’t love––though I wish
it was––but compulsion: 

the taking of a whole
planet down 

to its ashes
simply because we could. 

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Sara J Grossman is a poet and Associate Professor of Environmental Studies on the Johanna Alderfer Harris and William H Harris, MD Professorship in Environmental Studies at Bryn Mawr College. Her poems and essays have been published in Verse Daily, Cincinnati Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, American Literature, Environmental Humanities, Disability Studies Quarterly and elsewhere. Her first book of poems was published by New Issues Poetry & Prose in October 2018. She has received fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, National Endowment for the Humanities, The MacDowell Colony and Hedgebrook.