sits on a museum shelf in Dearborn, Michigan captured in a vial, sealed with a paraffin kiss displayed beside gramophone horns the size of elephant ears, dimpled glass photography plates the juddering haunt of incandescent bulbs
laboratory ghosts hovering above this relic of rarified air – preserved like fireflies in a mason jar and I wonder at the grand experiment that begins with
a push a slap a gasp a breath the nascent gulp of air fueling brain and cell, bone and blood, the rhythmic rise and fall of diaphragm and discovery
and how it ends the same, these trials and years in a specimen of breath backlit by tungsten flame – held, released, and held again – an artifact of inhalation, exaltation and all that comes between
Lucinda Trew lives, writes, walks a pair of unruly dogs, and geeks out over science stuff in Charlotte, N.C. Her work has been published in Susurrus Magazine, Burningword Literary Journal, The North Carolina Literary Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, storySouth, and elsewhere. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and recipient of Boulevard Magazine’s 2023 Poetry Contest for Emerging Poets. Her chapbook What Falls to Ground is forthcoming from Charlotte Lit Press.
