To discover how to be human now. Is the reason we follow this star –Auden The flare wasn’t aimed directly towards Earth, NASA just released. The largest solar flare in recorded history. There’s a magnetic swirl of iron and molten, larger than the world’s oceans protecting us from radioactive particles entering Earth. We all have fields. It’s vulnerable to stand on two feet, brains facing the sky, mutants in this atmosphere, afraid to be the first to die. Seneca said luck is when preparation and opportunity meet. Just last week I packed emergency supplies: a solar radio, batteries, flashlights, lentils, rice, canned peaches, his hands. How my lover cups my breast, carries our daughter, holds my son when he cries. As far as NASA knows the field’s been thinning, rapid changes. The Aurora Borealis are born charged particles, radioactive material colliding with oxygen– toxic silk lapping the poles. If it’s up to luck the sun will belch just enough for us to stay the night, to dream under green sky, while our cores thump and burn away.
Kathryn de Lancellotti’s chapbook Impossible Thirst was published June 2020, Moon Tide Press. She’s a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, and a former recipient of the George Hitchcock Memorial Poetry Prize. Her poems and other works have appeared in Thrush, Rust + Moth, The Night Heron Barks, The American Journal of Poetry, Quarterly West, and others. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada University and resides on the Central Coast, California, with her family.