FALSE SPRING (OR NOT)

by Joan Colby

Giraffes at the Brookfield (IL) Zoo enjoyed the unseasonably warm, spring-like weather on Saturday. —WLS, February 18, 2017.

It might feel good, but February’s intense heat is a very bad sign. The United States hits record high temps, as a climate change denier takes the reigns at the EPA. —Jeremy Deaton, ThinkProgress, February 23, 2017

The giraffes have exited their enclosure
To frolic at the Brookfield Zoo and rollerbladers
Score the lakefront with their raspy scales
While dog-walkers dodge and cyclists bail.
The waves lap at the breakwaters
As records shatter, volley ballers
In shorts and tanks leap and twist
While political appointees continue to insist
Global Warming is a left-wing myth.

Examine the glaciers from the satellite,
Splotches where ten years back there were acres.
The polar bears grow thin on thin ice.
Denials are simply words. The earth doesn’t care
As it continually gets hotter and hotter
And the open-water swimmers breaststroke
To the Crib far out in the blue waters
Glittering in the mid-February mild air.

Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press), Dead Horses and Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press), and Properties of Matter (Aldrich Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.