Christopher Martin
At the Periodic Table Display, Tellus Science Museum, Cartersville, Georgia
We walk the halls of the mineral wing,
pass petrified wood turned to quartz,
blinking maps illuminating
the mining zones of Georgia,
fluorescent rocks changing
colors at the push of a button.
My children touch everything
within reach, ignore my reading
of signs that say not to. They do
nothing different to the giant
periodic table covering the back wall:
My one-year-old daughter
slaps its glass case with all
she can muster, rests
a hand on a square far beneath
the stable rows―
K, potassium signified by a banana,
Ca, calcium, by a whelk shell and cherry antacids.
The actinides
are just her height, however, and soon she finds
Pu, taps a photograph, a mushroom cloud
bursting beside a note that explains
plutonium, an element
Named after the planet Pluto,
used in nuclear weapons.
The smallness, though,
the smallness of her hand within that frame,
explains something else altogether, explains
there is no explanation worth a damn.
Christopher Martin is author of the poetry chapbooks Everything Turns Away: Poems from Acworth and the Allatoonas (forthcoming with La Vita Poetica Press in spring 2014) and A Conference of Birds (New Native Press, 2012), as well as the Pushcart-nominated broadside "Marcescence" (Thrush Press, 2012). His work has appeared in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume V: Georgia (Texas Review Press, 2012), Shambhala Sun, Ruminate Magazine, Still: The Journal, Buddhist Poetry Review, Town Creek Poetry, St. Sebastian Review, and elsewhere, with poems forthcoming in Grit Po: Rough South Poetry (University of South Carolina Press, 2014) and Waccamaw. The editor of Flycatcher and a contributing editor at New Southerner, Chris lives with his wife and their two young children in the northwest Georgia piedmont. You can find him online at www.christopher-martin.net
Return to November 2013 Edition
We walk the halls of the mineral wing,
pass petrified wood turned to quartz,
blinking maps illuminating
the mining zones of Georgia,
fluorescent rocks changing
colors at the push of a button.
My children touch everything
within reach, ignore my reading
of signs that say not to. They do
nothing different to the giant
periodic table covering the back wall:
My one-year-old daughter
slaps its glass case with all
she can muster, rests
a hand on a square far beneath
the stable rows―
K, potassium signified by a banana,
Ca, calcium, by a whelk shell and cherry antacids.
The actinides
are just her height, however, and soon she finds
Pu, taps a photograph, a mushroom cloud
bursting beside a note that explains
plutonium, an element
Named after the planet Pluto,
used in nuclear weapons.
The smallness, though,
the smallness of her hand within that frame,
explains something else altogether, explains
there is no explanation worth a damn.
Christopher Martin is author of the poetry chapbooks Everything Turns Away: Poems from Acworth and the Allatoonas (forthcoming with La Vita Poetica Press in spring 2014) and A Conference of Birds (New Native Press, 2012), as well as the Pushcart-nominated broadside "Marcescence" (Thrush Press, 2012). His work has appeared in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume V: Georgia (Texas Review Press, 2012), Shambhala Sun, Ruminate Magazine, Still: The Journal, Buddhist Poetry Review, Town Creek Poetry, St. Sebastian Review, and elsewhere, with poems forthcoming in Grit Po: Rough South Poetry (University of South Carolina Press, 2014) and Waccamaw. The editor of Flycatcher and a contributing editor at New Southerner, Chris lives with his wife and their two young children in the northwest Georgia piedmont. You can find him online at www.christopher-martin.net
Return to November 2013 Edition