C.H.N.O.P.S. pronounced "sh-nops" and 98% of life
Poetry
carbon
-14 dating of Ötzi the iceman frozen in the Alps, and our ice ages too—we are dating ourselves, sooted footprints on sands delivered to bolster the eroding shores, where forests breathe hot breath like fogged mirrors, like halitosis, all night long—mouths agape, eyes watering, the carbon leaks like skeletal remains, our weakened spines bending us over toward backward in nothing but toward our beginning, into a green seed again, eventually, everything -one, fosters growth.
hydrogen
bomb/ what water/ what acid/ what life/ how many times the seal mothers said: we are this/ we are only this/ we are connected/ we are one water/ as if pleas of insanity brought solaces of a thousand new dawns for the infants not yet with us as we drown in the flooded lungs of: gone too far and late, our water breaking into brackish salts, goggles searching for a suffocating sea star still reticulating aglow.
nitrogen
and the green overgrowth: kudzu, algae, burdock, buckthorn, all in the green thumb of the jolly green giant waving us toward the valley—pulsing fluorescent green chia pets, who assumed abundance would be something we would get and not want, we are sinking in our own test tubes, glass streaked with fingertips, we can’t see out, take home experiments of how to contain the cows and the gas and the grass, the nitrate slipping, slipping down ravines into our wells and rivers.
oxygen
—build us up. break us down. how quickly metal erodes after a hurricane. scalloped scales of orange dusting. then what of our skin surface. is the air attacking us. the O of negativity. greedy electron vacuums of earth. and the earths within us. our own internal typhoons. our own autoimmunity. our own fires blown with bellows erupting and we rust. we pale in comparison. antioxidant waves.
phosphorus
simply the backbone of DNA, of us all, a steady two-step dance of sugar-phosphate-sugar-phosphate and man, I’m out of ATP—I’m tired, yet we stand, and dance, a song of the earth dying: ode-elegy-ode-elegy-ode-elegy…bang-anapest, we feel in our structural beings broken rhythm sliding us off center stage, a severe tilting of the earth off axis, we begin our limp, ode-elegy, no, we begin our leap, no, we’ve decided we want to sit this one out and wait for a better song.
sulfur
of sulfide gas which used to hover as wafting trails from highways to oceans, mangroves asking us to follow their steaming and reaching hands, breadcrumbs, making fast shade and rotten-eggs—it all meant life, the marker of cycles, hungry bacteria below, streaks of blood-red leaked from the knocked knees of mangrove feet, barnacled shells, skittering black crabs, we could see straight through the exposed bones, how it all worked, networks, we had worked our way down to the tiniest of units: the studies that will follow when we ask how fast an ecosystem dies, published behind a paywall, written with words no one knows anymore.