Poetry

Reuters photo

By

Jennifer Hernandez

Polar Vortex

At the eye doctor

they take a picture

of my eye, project it

on a screen. I can see

straight through

to the optic nerve.

Imagine cataracts,

a cloudy cap,

like polar ice

above the arctic circle,

where warming makes wind

wobble, split, shatter, spill,

wander into the mid-latitudes,

bone-chilling vagabond,

instant frostbite. We avoid

taking deep breaths and talking.

Meanwhile, the limbs

of sea stars fall off,

bodies disintegrate

into puddles.

Meanwhile, in Syria

29 children and newborns

have died in the last eight weeks,

mainly from hypothermia.

Jennifer Hernandez

Jennifer Hernandez is a proud K-12 public school teacher and a writer of poetry, flash, and creative non-fiction. Much of her recent writing has been colored by her distress at the dangerous nonsense that appears in her daily news feed. She is marching with her pen. Recent work appears in New Verse News, Rise Up Review and Writers Resist.