Narrated by Cathy Bryant
Illustration by Sue Babcock
Dearest, wildest Astatine,
Let’s get hydrogen and folic.
Oh, oxy, oxy, take off your chloride
and get completely scandium,
baring your barium.
I will cobalt your bismuth in kinesis,
so sodium that you rhodium.
Oh, how you rhodium.
Never has there been such potassium
between two alloys
– we will always be ferrous,
my berylium, my germanium,
my petite palladium, my sweet selenium.
Until the nitrogen. My bunsen burns for you.
Yours, Francium.
BIO: Cathy Bryant worked as a shoe shop assistant, life model, civil servant and childminder (among other jobs) before writing professionally. She has won 27 literary awards, including the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Prize and the Wergle Flomp Award for Humorous Poetry. She co-edited the anthologies Best of Manchester Poets vols. 1, 2 and 3, and Cathy’s own books are ‘Contains Strong Language and Scenes of a Sexual Nature’, ‘Look at All the Women’ and ‘Erratics’. Cathy is disabled and lives in Cadishead, UK. She also runs the Comps and Calls listings site of free opportunities for impoverished writers at www.compsandcalls.com/wp