Cold Light
Photinus pyralis
[S]everal lines of evidence indicate that [artificial light at night] interferes with firefly reproductive behavior and may heighten extinction risk.
– Sarah M. Lewis, BioScience, 2020
If or when you’re lucky enough to stay still
long enough for the dark to collect you, the fox
to lank oblivious at your feet, you’ll be met
where the streetlight fails: homegrown grub
of combustible proportions, fireworks harm-
less through the hickory, tinsel in July, symphony
of abdomen, spontaneous order—which you never
asked for, knew you needed, were handed
anyway, hold free like breath, tilt a palm face
up in prayer, let this small impossibility
grace your finger—this must be space
travel, the entire movable everything
a wobbling earth at paw’s length, becoming
less likely with each luminescent claim
to the night: herenowtherenowright
here, asserting the moment, a single graft
of time bending away from you—
less likely having existed at all.
Grant Kittrell is the author of Let’s Sit Down, Figure This Out (Groundhog Poetry Press). When he is not writing, he enjoys making music and visual art, gardening, and rambling through the understory. He has twice served as a judge for ASLE’s Environmental Creative Writing Book Award, and his own work has appeared in The Common, Salt Hill, Split Rock Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and Gigantic Sequins, among other publications. He works and teaches at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he lives with his partner Hannah and their bird-crazy pups, Margot and Hap.
Header image, oil painting of fireflies in a forest clearing, by Kiril Stanchev, courtesy Shutterstock.
