Harboring by Kate Gillespie
Illustrated by Sue Babcock
Touch its anaerobic sky to be burned. Sulfurous, tarry, black underneath inner harbor. Two half-centuries have flowed above, time trickles between the flattened layers. Ancient organisms never languid in fluid repose stretch out filaments. Gather in aggregates, colonies where the chemicals seep, deep, keep compounding novel catalysts. Eighty three years of folly falling into the algae slime into the city’s crime into the sifting sediment. Coaxed in nitrogen-flushed tubes— refugees of evolutionary phylogenetic trees. Feed them chlorine-coated chemical compounds, PCBs. Anaerobes exchange protons for donation of electrons and spit out anions to go make salt somewhere else. It’s hard-knock strife between the bedrock of ages. Liquescent horizons tenuous microbial life. Changing and rearranging, from the bottom up. Kate Gillespie is a microbiologist searching for her creative mojo. She is a poet, playwright, and fiction writer who balances creative writing endeavors with her marine biotechnology doctorate studies. An active participant in Baltimore’s literary arts community, Kate has been involved in cultural outings including Poets in the park, EMP Collective readings, Glass Mind Theater Group public lab, and Baltimore’s One Minute Play festival (OMP) . Her work has been published in Eight-stone Press “Smile Hon, you’re in Baltimore!”, The Magic Octopus, and Urbanite Magazine