[extreme environments]

Christopher Kondrich

Like a Wound in the Snow

Like a wound in the snow from which not blood

but algae blooms a startling red,

sang de glacier, as they call it in the Alps.

The overgrowth of pigment protects the algae

growing under the snow from ultraviolet light,

though researchers don’t know what spurs these blooms,

what makes the algae, Sanguina nivaloides,

bleed more. Bleed more, physicians said

until the end of the 1800s, convinced that bloodletting

reduced inflammation, cured asthma, pneumonia,

epilepsy, gout, nearly any ailment or illness,

even heartbreak, even nosebleeds. Just seeing blood

was cause to drain more of it with a brass lancet,

to part the flesh of a forearm like a forearm

parting a mound of snow. How little we knew

of our bodies, the world in which our bodies lived.

How much less we know about it now.

Punches Down

As the concrete is poured, it punches down.

Turns ground into road. We ground the earth

to road. The clinker mixed with gypsum mixed with water

pouring over all the angles the sunlight might touch

the ground from. As long as there is someone

beneath us. As long as there is a face

to greet our fist, we send it, the fist once sent to us,

we pass it down without hesitation. My fist grips the lever

and when I pull down, concrete fills the space

between sides of the street, clasps one side

to the other. A button of concrete

through a slit in the terrain that was pummeled

to prepare it. Bulldozed so that the soil would reach

its maximum density, so that it would take up the least

space possible, that space would no longer be possible,

the soil would have to make the most room

for the concrete it could. Then, with a trowel,

an edger, a control jointer, a broom

I spread the concrete into a face without expression,

not one whose cheeks can flush, blood not rising

from below as heat or embarrassment. Any stain or shading

is our blood shed over it. The crumbs of our bodies.

All of a body in each crumb. Every dead insect,

every mash of feathers and hollow bones a bird has flown to capacity

lying on the concrete, kept from sinking into the soil

to decompose. Maybe this is what we mean

when we say that a loved one has gone

to the other side, and what the concrete refuses

to let happen. It is bereft when I happen

upon it. A cicada on the sidewalk separated

from its wings, picked off by a mouth then discarded.

I poured this concrete and now it will not open,

not let the cicada break down into the soil on the other side.

On this side, it is still. Something still can be carried,

or can carry you. No—both. It must be both.

Sara Eliza Johnson