By Kite Marsh
All must go. The neighbor’s red Honda,
pink racing stripe, pink baby
seat, explodes
into brilliant particles. They float upstream.
Ancient Crown Vic (performance white,
wood trim) parked at Taco Bell lashes its hood,
leaps like a colt, beacon flashing:
vanishes.
At home the baby chews on tables.
Her teeth are crystallized calcium, phosphate.
Her parent’s ankle knots
with titanium. I myself
have one gold tooth.
The cars glut with aluminum
silicon lanthanum carbon,
Vanadium (also: in the plumpness
of sea cucumbers. And us).
Someone parked your first car at a church
and a space rock fell on it.
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
“To escape notice,” that’s lanthanum,i
and it did, until the Prius everted.
The air fills with a density of element.
Soon those who have been in a vehicle
have removed themselves at speed
with the dogs.
Ozone prickle, copper mist
Lance the nostrils. Banana-yellow Ford
bursts into flame, smells like toast.
A car has more vanadium than you but
that does not make it a better person.
My metal tooth has not made me a car.
Reportedly we wanted to mine sea cucumbers.ii
Rocky Mountain locusts believed extinct flew
in their trillions
One group bigger than California
took five days to transit the observer.iii
They carried their nutrients with them
Nitrogen, phosphorus, their tiny engines
When they died they left those elements on the land.
i NIH: “The name derives from the Greek lanthanein for “to be hidden” or “to escape notice” because it hid in cerium ore and was difficult to separate from that rare earth mineral.” https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/element/Lanthanum
ii I haven’t been able to substantiate this claim, made by the chemist John Emsley in a 2012 article (https://edu.rsc.org/elements/vanadium/2020031.article; he doesn’t say ‘mine’, of course). But I believe it.
iii Jeffrey Lockwood reports on Albert Lyman Childs’s measurements of a locust swarm published in 1880. The group of insects was some 1,800 miles long and at least 110 miles long. See https://www.hcn.org/issues/243/1369
Kite Marsh (she/her), a pen name, is an artist and devout fan of nutrient cycles. Her writing has appeared or will shortly in Broccoli and Source Magazine: Thinking through Photography.
Taco Bell Quarterly 