1. Arils 

But as a planet, you could palm eras solid and full as grapefruit, run 
fingers along the jawbone of Triceratops, last to fall in the ashcloud, 
too late to join kin, frill still salmon with mating. Oh, your strange
children; how you ache for their gregarious feet. All the Mesozoic, you 
had them; long enough to become your hypothalamus. I know you loved 
Tyrannosaurus, born angry, always biting; gentle Stegosaurus, raising 
shy faces in the cool morning. And when you shook with impact, oh, you 
still feel Triceratops circling the young, the twilight grief of eggs 
turning to stone. Sixty million years later, soft-skinned eukaryotes 
came down from the trees, calling out to heaven: We are here. 


2. Ghost ships 

Christmas, 1872: between New York and Italy, the Mary Celeste gleamed 
in calm water, captain’s cabin still warm, parlor melodeon humming, 
the imprint of a baby in the bed. Free of human hands, ships inscribe 
their own stories on the surface. Abandoned in 1931, steamer Baychimo 
sailed the Arctic for 38 years—still out there, pipes and tobacco left 
on tables. Oh, a vast quiet of eyelids, a fondness of seals and storms. 
2013: Lyubov Orlova, named for a blonde star, sailed herself for Tierra 
del Fuego: champagne coupes, stilled trombones, and sea-softened 
bottles rolling endlessly with the tides      clink          clink 
and the ship, a small white bird on the elephant skin of the sea. 


3. Marinière

When rain comes dragging knuckles across the floor, I’ll roast chicken 
with lemons and rosemary, collect gold from the pan like a secret, 
seine markets for fresh mussels, whole sweet shrimp, elephant garlic, 
tomatoes warm with sun. In my big blue pot, a garlicky melting: 
Moules Marinière, fennel unfurling, every kind of hunger pulled to 
the surface. I’ll gown a cake in buttercream as friends chase shrimp 
around bowls with buttered bread, laughter and glad sounds of bottles 
and glasses steaming the air with a language onomatopoeic as Guarani. 
Later I’ll dream of Paraguay and her rivers, where love is easy, a sky 
soft with lemon trees, my body filled with a green chattering of birds. 


4. Jötunn—the Frost Giants 

1868: The U.S. Geological Survey combed the wilds for Theia, the planet 
lodged inside the Earth. Deep in the mines, the wealthy came to dine 
by the light of wild, salt chandeliers: those who strayed from the edge 
of light were lost. Since I was small, I’ve waited for a giant to come 
striding out from the corner of my eye, teal-skinned, unsmiling 
in a felt shirt, eyes on distant rivers. Icelanders expect him, too, 
luring with those hunkered stone cairns that mimic his shoulders, 
electrical towers stretching kindred legs across the island. They say, 
to lick a giant’s skin brings madness: a taste of cod made holy, 
like gazing into a tree of blue eyes, a tree at the edge of the light. 


5. Information Entropy 

You share a photo, your same smile gleaming from a blurry sleigh ride 
and I know: I loved you before I met you. Ordinary radio waves follow 
the curvature of the Earth, but microwaves travel in straight lines. 
In 1956, the first transatlantic telephone cable seamed Scotland 
to Newfoundland. In the microphone, sound waves pressed carbon granules 
together, sending them out along copper wire. We could have phoned 
our past selves, vowels mineral with distance, thrill of voices through 
the night. Oh, I miss those crows and sparrows bowing icy cables, our 
crackling voices reaching for each other, rising toward now, into 
dreams just before waking: your cool, cedar voice, Atlantic hands. 

Lori Howe

is a co-creator of the new poetic form, the cadralor [plural: cadralore], and Editor in Chief of its flagship journal, Gleam. Her work appears in such journals as The Meadow, The Tampa Review, Sandstorm, Verse-Virtual, Synkroniciti, and MacQueen’s Quinterly. She is also the author of Cloudshade: Poems of the High Plains and Voices at Twilight (Sastrugi Press, 2015 and 2016 respectively) and the editor of Blood, Water, Wind, and Stone: An Anthology of Wyoming Writers (Sastrugi Press, 2016).

Ms. Howe lives and writes in Laramie, Wyoming, where she is a professor in the Honors College at the University of Wyoming, and mother to a feral cat named Miss Kitty Pants.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ An Incomplete List of All Exotic States of Matter and Opals and Other Edible Jewels, two cadralore by Lori Howe in Issue 17 of MacQ (29 January 2023)

⚡ Magnetoreception, a cadralor by Lori Howe in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 13, May 2022), nominated by MacQ for the Pushcart Prize

⚡ Refraction and Ripening, two cadralore by Lori Howe in MacQ (Issue 6, January 2021)

⚡ New Poetic Form With Wyoming Roots Goes Viral by Micah Schweizer at Wyoming Public Media (4 December 2020); includes audio of Lori Howe reading her cadralore (Numbers 9, 5, and 4)