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      April 27, 2025RazrasenyWhat Is Over Baltimore

      On TV, a child’s shoes lie in the road—
      then a headline: Could be DMS, they say,
      statistically shy of truth
      but mouthing it.
       
      A sky-seeding gas,
      exhaled from the sea’s skin,
      born of sun-stress and salt.
       
      I refresh the NASA archive—twice.
      Scroll spectra.
      Syntax hedges:
      tentative, consistent with,
      a candidate biosignature—
      on Earth.
       
      On Earth,
      it lifts from ocean skin—
      creature-breath cracked open
      by too much sun.
       
      And there,
      on a sub-Neptune
      called K2-18b,
      gravid with remove,
      gravity thick enough
      to cradle eight Earths
      or crush a few denials clean.
      And our breathless hope,
      the signal wavers.
       
      In the habitable zone,
      they say—
      but what does that mean
      on a burning world?
       
      Because here,
      this morning,
      another atmosphere flattens.
      A man—breathing,
      then not,
      under police restraint
      outside Baltimore.
       
      The footage loops.
      No name yet.
      No context,
      says the statement.
       
      But his breath—
      a biosignature,
      saturated,
      unreturned.
       
      And already, the network news
      is rehearsing its vocabulary—
      “incident,”
      “noncompliance,”
      “community trust initiatives.”
       
      And somewhere, a press officer
      workshops the phrasing:
      “an exothermic misunderstanding”
      (their phrase, not mine).
       
      I do not say these are equal.
      Only that
      I studied a transit light curve
      as a city truck sprayed bleach
      along the sidewalk
      where two unhoused men had slept,
      scrubbing biosignatures
      from concrete.
       
      I can’t distinguish
      dimethyl sulfide
      from disulfide
      at this resolution—
      nor what we call discovery
      from what we erase.
       
      Sixteen more hours,
      they say.
      Let the spectrum deepen.
      Let us learn
      if something breathes there
      or only simulates it.
       
      Not quite a sentence.
      Not quite a prayer.
      More like breath,
      held a second too long
      before it forgets
      what it was for.
       

      from Poets Respond

      Razraseny

      “This poem started after I read about NASA detecting dimethyl sulfide, a gas that on Earth only comes from living things, in the atmosphere of a distant exoplanet. At the same time, I was thinking about how often we miss signs of life closer to home. The poem came from that contrast; between the signals we chase in space and the ones we overlook on our own streets.”

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