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Posts Tagged ‘Kate Gillespie’

Published by Associate Editor on November 15, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

Harboring by Kate Gillespie

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

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