Corner of a Cold Room  
  

  
     This corner of a cold room  
     is slowly shrinking,   
     dissipating as the winter's air is
     breathed warm by metal sidelines (heaters,
     if one couldn't tell).
     The temperature drops from
     98.6 to 95.1  not  
     much unless in medical terms or mathematics;
     postulate 1: an inverse
     relationship exists between room  
     degrees Fahrenheit, irrationality  
     and body Kelvin,  
     absolute.  
  
          Kerry walked across the woodsy scene;  
     it was a forest, as any poetic landscape might  
     be.  She said, "Why are branches over my
     head and earth under my feet?  Why does solidity
     exist in fiction, not in reality?"  Kerry picked 
     a cranberry beneath her fingertips, placed 
     there by grips paid 2 greek coins an hour -- coins 
     carried by woodlands fairies under the employ 
     of Sylvia Plath, sylva meaning woods.  
  
     This corner of a cold room 
     is slowly shrinking, 
     not expanding with the warm
     air as a balloon should, but after
     all this is no mylar billboard 
     declaring, "I love you".  Besides,  
     those biodangerous tokens will seep into dump
     sites like greek coins, corroding 
     the knotted roots of maple, oak, elm, birch,
     mulberry -- killing them sure as lye.  

          A thousand years later, one digs them up:  
     the green metal shards and remnants of trees,  
     fallen.  
 


     --jennifer crystal chien