1. Pripyat Amusement Park 

April 27, 1986: Inside, the bumper cars shone, 
gleaming capsules in rose, forest, and gold, eager 
to lift and thrill. When the reactor failed at Chernobyl, 
the tangerine swings held, for a few hours, the weight 
of human bodies, families waiting for news, children screaming 
in delight as they rose and fell into the darkening. Now, 
the rides kill time, flaking cadmium into cracked boulevards, 
the very air around them monstrous, sinewed by heat. 


2. The Language of footsteps 

Salmon are anadromous; they live in both fresh and salt 
water, and we record their soundscapes, seeking meaning 
in fish voices. Are they hungry or afraid, do they long 
for each other? All I can tell you is that I love the sound 
of feet in shoes. How reassuring, this proof that we walk 
here, our ephemeral fingerprint, the peculiar music of soles 
and arches, leather and strings, the glint of rubies on summer 
sidewalks. Stories we tell the earth with our own two feet. 


3. Nacre 

is the substance inside the oyster shell; 
it creates pearls by trying to heal wounds, covering 
the living heart again and again until something beautiful 
forms. I’d like to tell you this is true of us, too, 
that all the pain we endure accumulates as beauty: 
that the tortured stalagmitic caverns of salt we carry 
around inside us are filled with a pirate’s hoard 
of pearls—that this is why it is so hard to breathe. 


4. I Soon Fell 

A friend shares a selfie, standing sure atop a gnarled rock, 
mountains gathered in his outstretched arms like cousins 
on holiday. “I soon fell. And it’s my birthday! 44 today!” 
We all fall into the arms of laundry and dinner, pages 
between birthdays turnsoquicklythatsomeareonlysmudged, 
memories crowded a thousand to a house. This morning, I saw 
a dark man kneel in the grass, then burst, raining skyward in 
grackles. I can hear his shouting laugh rising in blue air. 


5. Secchi Disks 

measure the depth at which something transparent becomes 
opaque. Humans look out on bodies of water and see only 
the surface, turquoise or grey with storm. A blessing for whales, 
for giant squid, to have a ceiling, a heaving privacy between us 
and them, and better, too, for us: oh, the beauty of not knowing, 
the great, gleaming mystery of a dorsal fin, sleek ebony, 
breaking the surface tension between us and the undersea, 
making us children again, honestly, in wonder. 

Lori Howe

is a co-creator of the 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); the first one was recently nominated by MacQ for Best of the Net 2024.

⚡ 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)