- By Dave Earnhardt
Hot and Cold

Mrs. Greenlaw modeled endless space
for her third-grade students
with a mobius strip,
which, for its implications
about the nature of irony
(which they knew by the name,
“adventure”) they accepted
instinctively,
delighting in the idea
that you could repeat your journey
forever, if you had
time enough to reach the end.
Some names students also found
charming,
since they led
to fantastic terms—“nova”
and “quasar,” even “white dwarf,”
with its suggestion
of a fairytale place,
though a few, like “wormhole,”
offered an image-defying
suggestion of extraterrestrial earthiness
and suppressed aspiration,
receiving only whispers; nonetheless,
students repeated the term
for a while amongst themselves.
Extremes of temperature—two-hundred-
below on Uranus,
four-hundred above on Venus,
after the laughter,
elicited wide-eyed wonder
and drew whistles,
even when the teacher explained
it had been nothing more,
though glowing,
than a puny little molten nugget
for 4.6 billion years.
Yet one example
of the diminution
of material properties
was amazing to everyone,
so drew cheers, whistles, claps,
and even
a stomping of the feet—the fact
that a one-inch cube of iron
from the planet hot Jupiter CoRoT-20b,
a “gas giant”—would have had
enough mass
to shoot straight through the earth
like a hot knife
through a cube of butter,
or an image
through an unfettered young mind.
Finally, though manned moon landings
elicited only yawns,
when the teacher asked,
“Who thinks there’s life on Mars?”
immediately, over a sea of starry eyes
a galaxy of little hands shot up
into the rarified air like hot rockets.
Dave Earnhardt is from Denver, Colorado. He's been published in Lyrical Voices,The Occasional Review, ERAS,Voices International,Black Bear Publications,Whaleane,The Aurorean,Driftwood PressandTenth Muse. He writes in every genre, including music; his CD is “Classically Blue.” He has taught secondary and college English; earned his master’s degree in literature and language at Indiana University and the University of Northern Colorado.