1. Detritus 

Last night, the summer streets ran deep in rain, blue with hydrangeas. 
When I was a girl, the Ohio river flooded Portsmouth: traffic lights 
up to their armpits, bad things swirling below. I was young enough 
to translate disaster as magic. I dreamed, not of men in boats, 
but of jewelry cases like clear sarcophagi, gems dry and gleaming 
inside while the waters rose and rose, women’s dresses swirling 
on hangers, hats perched up high, delicate and clean. This morning, 
I cross a curving line of stones in the street, a knobbed cretaceous 
spine. Oh, how unexpectedly sharp, these things washed to the surface. 
How easily we cut ourselves on the edges of the long dead. 


2. Compression 

Blue-green algae inhaled the orange, methane sky and exhaled oxygen, 
binding bacteria to sediment in oozing dreams of 3 billion years, piling 
themselves into stromatolites, exhaling malted breaths of woolen coats 
left hanging in grange halls after the war. In the Bighorn Mountains, 
you can sit beside a stromatolite, accordion edges deckled with time. 
In Finland, visit the first diving suit, the Old Gentleman of Raahe—
a tardigrade made of calfskin, waterproofed with tallow and pitch. 
The diver enters through a hole in his stomach, pulling it closed 
as the hood fills with air: human fingers, alveoli, body an intelligent 
lung longing only to exhale a plume into the bright, clean sky. 


3. Observatorielunden, Stockholm, Sweden 

Below the observatory, a woman watches her small daughter, bright 
in a red woolen coat, the pool a graphite rectangle thick with cold. 
Below the surface, three koi stream away, a surprise of fire as dark 
dwindles in. The veil of atoms grows thin, afternoon light sharpened 
by hungers. The woman calls to her daughter—not too far, my darling. 
At 3, she is learning to run, those bowed, musical steps. Looking back, 
she raises scarlet wings. The waning day fills with pockets, the way dark 
matter shapes our dimension from the other side. As spiced coffee pours 
thick as chocolate, beauty favors the equations of unseen corners, 
the way spoons made of gallium disappear if the water is just right. 


4. Sonder 

Outside the Goodwill, lawn chairs angle toward each other, blue-green 
straps faded since the ’70s, when last deployed to parties lit by paper 
lanterns, children playing tag, a long, quiet drink of something cold 
and sweet, grilled burger scent in the still-warm air. Young mothers 
in white pants and cork-wedge heels carried cakes and salads 
in Tupperware, gathering in the kitchen, voices rising and falling, 
a curtain of light. Gingko trees, in all their golden flumes, survived 
the atomic blast at Hiroshima. Every atom of that evening, every swath 
of bright lipstick, every arm and cheekbone of lost brothers and sons—
gone in a rush of subatomic particles rising like carp to feed at dusk. 


5. Forno 

You built this forno for me, refractory bricks the color of honey, 
a mortar you mixed from memory: sand, olive oil, feathers and straw, 
blood, clay, diatomaceous earth. As with beehive kilns, the first fire 
will crack or bind it as disparate atoms seethe out to seek a map: 
how to become a body? How to offer it to fire, to bake a fine, seeded 
loaf in a glowing hot enough to render glass ... and, still, the air fills 
with wheat, water, oil, and salt, leavening agents, what it means to be 
whole, the way the ghost bones and ship’s cartilage in my torso settle 
greenly down to rest, a dreamt outline of Angkor Wat at dawn, your warm 
skin against mine, the 3-sphere ache that brings me always back to you. 

Lori Howe

is a co-creator of the new poetic form, the cadralor [plural: cadralore], and Editor in Chief of its flagship journal, Gleam. Her work appears in such journals as The Meadow, The Tampa Review, Sandstorm, Verse-Virtual, Synkroniciti, and MacQueen’s Quinterly. She is also the author of Cloudshade: Poems of the High Plains and Voices at Twilight (Sastrugi Press, 2015 and 2016 respectively) and the editor of Blood, Water, Wind, and Stone: An Anthology of Wyoming Writers (Sastrugi Press, 2016).

Ms. Howe lives and writes in Laramie, Wyoming, where she is a professor in the Honors College at the University of Wyoming, and mother to a feral cat named Miss Kitty Pants.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ An Incomplete List of All Exotic States of Matter and Opals and Other Edible Jewels, two cadralore by Lori Howe in Issue 17 of MacQ (29 January 2023)

⚡ Magnetoreception, a cadralor by Lori Howe in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 13, May 2022), nominated by MacQ for the Pushcart Prize

⚡ Refraction and Ripening, two cadralore by Lori Howe in MacQ (Issue 6, January 2021)

⚡ New Poetic Form With Wyoming Roots Goes Viral by Micah Schweizer at Wyoming Public Media (4 December 2020); includes audio of Lori Howe reading her cadralore (Numbers 9, 5, and 4)