Poetry by Jessica Rizzolo
A POEM WITH NO DEATH
No more abyss,
or corpse-colored fish.
No more stark cease
or blind-white sea
snakes. No more whales
who grieve their own.
In the laboratory, archaea,
the ancients, reanimate
after tens of thousands of years,
begin to feed again.
In the April thaw,
the dead have changed their minds.
Have let me be.
I will not call this grief,
but now, remembering
I am still here.
Biologists named these single cells
extremophiles because they survive
extreme milieus: the sea,
the deepest stomach. How she held
hers, the tangle of cancer.
How my gut remembers
the first warm swarm of nuclei
when it sparked in the microbial green.
The green of remembrance.
A newborned, April green.
Dr. Jessica Bell Rizzolo is a conservation scientist and poet based in Chicago, Illinois. Her academic writing has been featured in Global Ecology and Conservation, Nature Conservation, Society & Animals, Frontiers in Conservation Science, and elsewhere. Her poetry has most recently appeared in Humana Obscura, Salamander, Sublunary Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Literary Mama, and Memorious. She has participated in the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Winter Workshop, and the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop. Jessica is an MFA student in Poetry and Literary Translation at Bennington Writing Seminars.
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