If I Were Frida Kahlo
~Amanda Hempel

Perhaps a ten percent chance, he said.
My heart slid across his perfect white wall
and I shrank under my paper sheet.

If I were Frida Kahlo,
I would paint my cystic ovaries
in a pale green thunderstorm sky.

If I were Frida Kahlo, my uterus
would hang in churning clouds
raining blood above salted earth.

With no god to blaspheme,
I cursed traffic, potholes, the fact
that I already knew her name.

*

Pas de Deux with Tiger
~Suzanne Edison

In hungry silence air feeds sparks:
my child’s body wrestles itself, predator
and prey, night paws

my mind. In dreams
I am orange-tongued fire
squealing through unsealed cracks.

I am split, a hard cone exposing
seeds, scorched brush that should
bare fresh ground but I wake

like Demeter wanting to banish
the Sun and blue-belled hyacinths,
command Winter strangle the world.

Ash dawn cracks the morning, strains
of my child’s breath rise
above sleep’s surface,

a canyon wren’s riff,
notes whole and held, counter-
point to my insistent roaring.

*

An ODE to Radioactivity
~Rahul Dandekar

One fine day, the century before last,
Henry, a Becquerel, found himself aghast.
The photofilm that he hath so carefully shielded,
To some mysterious radiation had somehow yielded!

But he could protect it, he found, with some layers of lead,
The scientist began to think himself not too right in the head.
The clue lay in an adjoining drawer, a salt of the rare uranium,
Bequerel, satisfied to the core, thanked profusely his cranium.

Scientists soon pounced on the element, and happily played,
It emitted three rays, it seemed, and the emission decayed.
The three types were then baptised, alpha-beta-gamma.
Alpha was the heavyweight, but gamma did the harm-a.
(The radiation, though exciting, was indeed damaging,
Not all the researchers met their deaths by aging.)

The part of radioactivity that’s most weighty
Is that you can write a very simple O D E
Although you have to reason a little bit
About the atoms per unit time go oblit.

It’s random, jumbled, fumbled, culled,
Poisson being the god of that world.
But watch! If there be more atoms,
More must undergo the swat-ems.
If there’re fewer for the guillotine
Fewer than previous ‘ll be keen.

We lay down a new Law this day,
A law that decaying atoms obey.
The number that goes kaboom,
Every fleeting second of doom,
Is proportional to it’s brethen,
The number that sec breathin.

And thus, more to see them,
Means more to disappear,
And The Law so ordained,
Is an exponential – swear.

And thus, the atoms die,
One after another, sigh,
Often the offsprings,
Atoms so produced
Decay themselves,
A Little bemused.

But in the end,
Every single
One mingles
With dust.

Or Strong
Ol’ Lead.
The end
result.