GW20:12

This year is the warmest year on record.
Feverish. Blood pressure off the charts.
White count up. Sea level up. Hurricanes
spiral across the continent, wars spawn
like virus. The Middle East goes up
in smoke, sparked by some careless match.
The globe seems to wobble. Hyperkinetic
pulse. Myocardial infarction. Anti-
biotic-resistant strain. Desperate
migrations of polar bears, seals, and monarchs.
A whine of sinus. An ache of eye-teeth.
An inflammation of the senses.
The world created in our image: made new.
A world we thought we knew, but don’t know now.

Priscilla Frake is the author of Correspondence, a book of epistolary poems. She has work in Verse Daily, The Sun, Nimrod, The Midwest Quarterly, Medical Literary Messenger, The Wayfarer, Whale Road, Spoon River Poetry Review, and The New Welsh Review, among others. Anthology publications include Weaving the Terrain: 100 Word Southwestern Poems, Enchantment of the Ordinary, and Women. Period. She lives in Asheville, NC, where she is a studio jeweler.