We, Our Perishable Food
The first summer I lived in Iowa it was so hot I fantasized about climbing into the refrigerator.
So much corn dried up and died. Two years later, I was listening to a radio station in Indiana called Korn! It was the first time I had ever heard someone with a New Zealand accent sing along to country music. When we got off the highway for dinner, our waitress confused vegetarian with lesbian. We counted water towers on the drive back to Iowa City. If you put a physicist and a biologist in a car together for nine hours, then they will find something to quantify. For the first time, I’m not summering in the midwest. Now does not one sick hen sound like one second? Book alive like a bird, they had to kill five million chickens on a farm in north western Iowa because of bird flu. These hens are little more than one percent of the nation’s egg layers, yet there may consequences the Iowa Poultry Association Executive Director said. Which came first the chicken or the egg?
Which came first the ribosome or the protein?
Something wilder than Iowa
would be a tall experiment. You are on a pear. We, our perishable food, refrigerators white, like eggshells protect. After the ford model T was introduced, refrigerators cost more than cars for many years. On machines and pollution, think of the air, think of the increasing concentration of carbon monoxide before the two-way catalytic converters created carbon dioxide. A refrigerator is not a Faraday cage, but a microwave is. Physical chemists accidentally melted chocolate bars with microwaves in the laboratory. Books taste like chicken: bone white, fat light, muscle is surprising me. To sing the incubator more effective for bacterial growth, because those plasmids slow them down. The rhyme, the White was laboratory and mentor, and the white refrigerator. The experiment time, I’m not falling and fully grown yet planning. Please said.
Julia Rose Lewis is poet in residence of the archeology department University of Wales Trinity St David. She lives on Nantucket Island and is a member of the Moors Poetry Collective. Her poems have appeared in their anthologies, Firefly, 3am Magazine, and Backlash.
