Science & Poetry

Last Rites

by Jessie Roncevic

I heard- 

An idiot, full of sound and fury1 

Calling out to me.  

Ghosts blossomed from the depths of buried blight  

Tasting the lingering bitterness 

My weeping mother  

Ripped from her wailing newborn. 

I felt the waves of putrid flesh of my beheaded father encircle me.  

Frightened, maimed, and shackled, I saw 

You. Tethered to your masts,  

Coldly watching the burning blizzards of your cities rising up 

Merrily singing as all corners of Leviathan advanced against the night. 

In every narrative you churn 

 I will always be  

Entangled  

in mercy. 

In my story, I see 

You, stretched across the trenches 

Cannibalized, in your bottomless pit of flight 

Once raging against the dying of the light2  

Now shrouded. 

Exiled from our homes,  

You and I 

Praying prey, cried out  

To absent Father. To broken Mother. 

Silence only echoed back 

Settling deep- 

Where our ghosts sink  

scattered in the stillness 

Lost forever to the glory of the light.  

Wave 

by Peyton Mcmanus

I have grown so tired of being a person 

rather than a wave on a shore 

or a breath of the sunset 

I’ve grown so weary of fighting losing battles 

rather than letting my body float 

on the water–return to where it came from– 

and I have grown so sad 

of holding on to transient movements 

rather than letting my soul be a wave 

on the ocean of an existence.