© 2025 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
Lynn McGee loves of animals—she can pick up a snake—and by connection she loves the environments that they live in. This love creates empathy in her work. I’ve known Lynn since 2003 when we were colleagues at Borough of Manhattan Community College, new teachers at the beginning of the century. The first poem of hers she ever gave me was about a wasp, poisonous and fragile, living, dying in the elements, and being born again, nature afresh. The poems in Lynn’s new book, Science Says Yes, including that wasp from twenty years ago, I am happy to say, are still often full of animals, including us, the human ones.
When you love something, you understand it, and when you understand it, you notice and see the details. The word science, by the way, comes from the Latin, scire, to know, and that’s what Science Says Yes wants to do, to understand and to know.
As chaotic and confusing as the world may be, Lynn’s poems make sense and lets us know we are in this mess together. When a poem by Lynn says, “This is it,” it is because there is honest perception in it. Reading Science Says Yes not only reassured me and made me feel better, but when I was finished, I knew stuff I didn’t know before. Spread the news. Who could ask for anything more?
In the Vimeo below Lynn reads poems from Science Says Yes. Enjoy.
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The five poems below are from Science Says Yes. Except for “Biking It Off,” they are not read in the Vimeo.
How to Rewire Your Traumatized Brain
I woke one morning last winter and asked Siri
what the temperature was: 82 degrees.
The world had gone from freezing to balmy,
overnight.
Full of groggy joy, I opened a window,
and cold rolled over me as if I were standing
at the open door of a walk-in freezer.
I felt pranked by AI, as I went about my day.
My dog and I headed out, and delicate sprays
of hail cooled the back of my neck,
made her fur glisten.
We arrived at the pond and sunlight pierced
the clouds, ignited its surface.
A pair of mallards floated touching each other,
wings tucked tight, shellacked by sun —
one with a green, iridescent throat, the other
the color of dried grass.
They glided on the water’s surface, hinged
to their own image.
My dog and I stood silent at the pond’s
muddy bank.
There are days we make false starts,
wish for foolish things —
and then there are the ducks,
the beautiful ducks.
Biking It Off
Claritin, caffeine, cannabis — I’m self-medicating
through a breakup, inhaling late-summer musk that rises
from a mud path packed flat in a forest drunk
with the deep-summer saturation of glucose and green,
muffled pop of a tennis ball counter-balanced
by the whack of a cricket bat. I’m wearing
a helmet and my skull heats up, my heart fills, all four
chambers pulling tight as a rowing crew leaving
its long V down a river. I’m coasting
on the inertia of my own mass. I’m a dog with its
head out the car window, heading home, where
a breeze laps my balcony and I stretch out
on a yoga mat, looking up at the racing sky. Low sun
ignites the distant ridge of trees. Air cools fast
but surfaces are still warm, the food chain
in full swing. Birds dive with expert haste. Insects
breed as fast as they can line up sperm packets
and ducts, sometimes midair.
Animals Will Take Over the Earth, After We
Eradicate Ourselves
A wasp goes limber in the sauna
of a kitchen window,
is coaxed ambling onto the corner
of an index card, carried sailing
to that place where the universe opens
and with magnificent greed,
closes on its bumbling descent,
snow melting on impact,
hardening like teeth on six legs
swimming, then curling
as it sinks into white,
sun exploding in the distance,
churning paper nest
attached like an organ
to great ribs of the attic.
You Are Made of Stardust
A power line is out of sorts, electric buzz slicing
through the haze of dusk, every living thing
the target of ions in a beeline for somewhere else.
We are the meat that exploded stars pass through.
I don’t know where I end and the city begins.
I gave you my story and the story under that.
I am free as a comet. I am made of ice. I melt.
Why Starting Over Can Be the Best Thing for You
The frog’s heart generates a gel that grips
its organs like anti-freeze. In spring,
the frog thaws from the inside
out, and blinks.
Every winter that passes, is a triumph.
I clench my gut, carry longing for the sun
like an egg in my throat.
I start over. I blink.
Science Says Yes is published by Broadstone Books. You can check it out here:
If you want to know more about Lynn McGee and her work, you can check it out here:
Lynn and Josie