Orb Weaver

after Joyelle McSweeney

every green bottle flees my poison, every prancing roach respects the death I’ve chosen, every heartsick moth spurns the light in my eyes, every calm spider weaves a tomb in moonlight, every prey eye scans for strands, and dies

Transition Metals

The chemical element chromium “is what makes stainless steel stainless.” It is released into the air and water in huge quantities by steel mills in Northwest Indiana, where I grew up. The red color of rubies is due to trace amounts of chromium. I just read that a worker died at a steel casting facility in Ohio after molten steel was “poured on him.” Roman general Marcus Licinius Crassus was killed by having molten gold poured into his mouth. Researchers poured molten lead into a disembodied cow larynx: They learned that the explosion of steam is probably what kills you in this situation. The preserved bodies from Pompeii aren’t bodies, but plaster casts of voids left in the igneous rock. In “The Fire of Love,” a documentary about married volcanologists who die in an eruption, a shot of a seemingly endless plain covered in black igneous rock. The scientists want to show you a perfect elephant-shaped impression, and in the impression are white elephant bones, and among the bones are already sprouting flowers and weeds.