NOT ACTUALLY A POEM but some extremely great science writing that the weather service still uses, it gets me so HET UP as I read it because I am like "YEAH those branches are gonna start swaying!!! oh heck oh heck here it comes! MORE WIND!"
Description on Land | Description at Sea
Calm: Smoke rises vertically. | Sea like a mirror.
Butterfly Pavilion I stand before the cocoons, waiting for a twitch in the shells, a crack revealing a colorful wing. There are none. The cocoons are pinned to cork boards, each dangling from its tip, ordered by species and country of origin. Some look like snails. Some look like tiny black bugs. Some are the green of the first leaves of spring. Nothing today. I turn to the butterflies around me, broken out of their…
Aimee Nezhukumatathil's previous World of Wonder columns for The Butter can be found here. I’m so excited to talk about this animal, friends! But first: I should mention that my time here on The Butter is sadly coming to an end. I have just one more entry for the World of Wonder column at the end of the month. I’ll be on sabbatical at the small college where I teach, and that means I…
Attaining a lifelong dream — who doesn’t want to? — can prove difficult when your efforts are taken hostage by nature’s whims. I know this from personal experience. After two well-planned trips to take in the magical glow of the aurora borealis, I still rely on photos and YouTube videos, representations that only tease. My quest began in earnest when an email from Astronomy magazine offered a tour to Iceland, a trip designed for aurora viewing.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil's previous World of Wonder columns can be found here. When you talk about basket stars (Gorgonocephalus eucnemis), you have to talk about moxie. A basket star isn’t a sea star—it travels as it pleases across sponges and coral with its five arms, not on tiny tubed feet like a sea star. Basket stars are the biggest of all brittle stars—from tendrilly arm to even more tendrilly arm, basket stars measure about three…
I am a spindly seven-year-old boy, flaxen-blonde and bronzed from a week in the summer sun, crouching by a small hole in the sand at the crack of dawn. I’m the only one on the beach, beating the sunbathers and the joggers—even the fishermen. I’m studying the numerous tiny tracks that lead away from the hole.
It cannot be denied that the closer a human being comes into proximity with a plant, the more unlovely and unsettling the plant becomes. This is why it is impossible to trust anyone who owns houseplants; they are unstable and untrustworthy people, and there is something eldritch hiding just behind their faces. Plants are a parody of sentience. They sway passively in the wind while emitting secret poisons and secretly burrowing roots downward to hold…
