1. Thermotaxis 

New Year’s Day, 1896: In Leadville, Colorado, the Ice Palace 
opened, a Norman castle 450 feet long, 320 feet wide, ice-
block walls three feet deep. Inside, vast ballrooms stretched away, 
electric lights frozen in ice casting subaquatic shadows 
on ladies’ fur hats, and the skating rink became a village, 
16,000 feet of ice ringing with skates and laughter. 
The dining hall echoed with champagne corks and toasts, 
offerings displayed inside the walls. Ah, rarity. Great minds 
of the world, Aristotle to Da Vinci, believed in unicorns; 
Queen Elizabeth possessed a horn valued in whole palaces. 


2. The Invisible Man 

I lay awake, wondering if the Invisible Man could see himself; 
if, when he brushed his teeth, a self looked back. Could he tell 
his eyes were hazel, his hair a creeping tawny mess? He loved 
the brush of strangers’ skin in subway cars, their startled looks 
and perfume. He picked up the frequencies of human organs 
like a transistor radio: the whitewater vibrations of hands; 
the maxilla, shouting headlines. Of all organs, though, he 
favored the eyeball, the way vitreous humor magnifies thought 
in the ocular globe. Rainy days, he sat in libraries, listening 
to eyes, their clear fluid like movie screens in the pale air. 


3. Convergent evolution 

The first horses, hyracotherium, were tiny and delicate, 
toothed like primates, with toes instead of hooves, 
their coats a striped fawn for safety in the forest. 
Whales evolved to land before returning to the sea, 
and dinosaurs were feathered, bright as parrots and angels, 
not the brown and grey of picture books. Sometimes, 
when I ache for humanity, it is enough to know that reindeer 
eyes glow blue in winter; like labradorite, they house the Aurora 
Borealis. Amber will still be warm to the touch 
when the next species with hands holds it up to the light. 


4. Impossibilities 

stack like containers on cargo ships, lining basement shelves 
and the space under beds, crusting the corners of our dreams, 
boxes of exciting objects packed carefully away, labeled No. 
And yet, on this day in 1907, in San Francisco Aquatic Park, 
Harry Houdini escaped his chains underwater: one held breath. 
A century later, Lynne Cox swam to Antarctica, cutting pan ice 
with her lobster-red arms, redefining this word, impossible, 
as something like linear time: we embrace clocks and the holy 
nomenclature of Linnaeus, preferring the safety of knowing 
to vocabularies of wonder, to heavenly bodies of possibility. 


5. Berry picking and other acts of mercy 

It was hot in the old grey Honda, children bored to kicking 
and tears. We pulled over, unfolding our bodies into a living 
breeze, like being born. And then, we saw them: bushes alive 
with blackberries, bursting black honey in the afternoon sun. 
Grinning, we waded into the vines with an enameled coffee pot, 
mugs, bowls, even frisbees, returning heaped with dark jewels. 
The heat broken to violets, we ate our fill of berries so dear 
that, at home, no one ever felt satisfied. Smiling over 
drowsy children, hands stained with unexpected pleasure, 
it was easy to believe, one last time, that we were happy. 

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)