Ellen Welcker
Pennsylvania
We were swimming,
bobbing in the tide with all the people,
talking about puberty.
Phthalates, I say, parabens &
phenols, BPA, PBDEs & perchlorate—
whose little baby drank rocket fuel
& squishing your cheeks in my mind.
You don’t like ‘puberty’—who does—
we call it ‘Pennsylvania,’
veer briefly toward ‘spon-
taneous’ & ‘laboratory.’ Beautiful.
Polychlorinated biphenyls, I say, a link
between exposure & onset—the mother—
her child lying limp on her nose—
the orcas of the Salish Sea & the mothers
of Flint & Bundaberg & Kabwe
& Oakdale & Lahore & Johnson
County are lingering
as I do with you here, in the warm wash
of human tide, saying Pennsylvania happens
when it happens, as if passively
precocious—the brain letting go
of its hormones like bubbles. Factors,
as if in a bubble, include being a girl.
Ellen Welcker’s books are Ram Hands (Scablands Books, fall 2016), The Botanical Garden (Astrophil Press 2010), which was selected by Eleni Sikelianos for the Astrophil Poetry Prize. Her Chapbooks include The Pink Tablet, (Fact-Simile Editions, 2018), Mouth That Tastes of Gasoline (alice blue books, 2014); and The Urban Lightwing Professionals (H_NGM_N, BKS, 2011). Recent poems are in Okey-Panky, Gramma Daily, and Poetry Northwest, as well as in the anthology WA129: Poems Selected By Tod Marshall: State Poet Laureate, 2016–2018 (Sage Hill Press, 2017). Ellen lives in Spokane, Wash. Online at ellenwelcker.com
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