Where

You hear one degree. You hear Fahrenheit.
You hear warm weather in your hometown
And leave before the local news switches: they
Say half a degree, say Celsius, say warming
Global climate, so beeswax melts

Out your ear as it ships
Past the Sirens atop bones with plastic
Six pack yokes around them still choking
Those in rigor mortis. You hear them
As one hurricane siren—not constant, plural

Puddles feet deep of human waste smacking
Against Achilles—and chase them. As it turns out,
At half a degree warmer, all of you go
From underwater Otoh Gunga, Sub Diego, and Atlantis
To Upper and Lower Keys, Atlantic and Ocean City:

You go closer from myth to thawed
Greenland; deep-frozen heat in the sky
With smog and lung with tumor tips car
Exhaust pipes, blocking your airways
Yet trafficking cough drop

Needs; the soil’s dry spots a caught black sea bass,
Flat as a skate: you could skate on drought
To the North Pole and fall
Into the Arctic Ocean, devoid of any ice.
Algae moves out, breaks up with coral,

Who then bleaches their skin and dies,
The hottest day on record breaking
Its own record every two years until
Heat strokes are common colds
Nobody’s immune to, everywhere—

_______

Prince Bush reads poetry for TriQuarterly and lives in Nashville, TN. He was a Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets fellow, and he graduated from Fisk University as an Erastus Milo Cravath Presidential Scholar.