Sport 43: 2015
Max L. Chapnick — Nucleators
Max L. Chapnick
Nucleators
in which a young poet’s mother helps design a spaceship
When the Committee built
the spaceship they thought to build
a room for snow. They dreamed of carrying
one box-like space of shiny
to the blackness, the scrape of ice-
crystals, the white taste, a frozen retreat
of melt-in-your-mouth. My
mom explained, within each
flake lives a bacterium. Prisms
of water do not spontaneously
emerge. Maybe snow never
existed, in forms like this,
before microorganisms.
So she told them bring
me a bucket of invisible
snow builders
and I will build you
a loom for chemistry-
conjured ice.
I peer out
at manufactured
molecules locked
in place, white proof
of life staring back,
creatures shuttling
icy space-
ships, falling
into new homes.