Inherent Limitations of Scale
after Kay Ryan’s “Dynamic Scaling”
the model boat in the
model waves made of water
molecules of a certain
irreducible size
wind tunnel, containing
miniature plane &
standard-sized wind
Four Degrees Celsius
We wanted perfect knowledge.
We went to the trouble of making
a perfectly shrunken ship, but
the water. We can’t make it smaller.
Difficult molecule, bigger when hotter
but bigger when cold, most tightly
configured at about four degrees
and like anything, consisting
near entirely of nothing.
Jacquelyn Bengfort was born in North Dakota and holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an MPhil from the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and a B.S. from the U.S. Naval Academy. Her creative work has been supported by a Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellowship, three individual artist grants from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and a scholarship from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Jacquelyn is the author of the Ghost City Press micro-chapbooks Navy News Service and Suitable for All Methods of Communication. After fourteen (non-consecutive) years in DC, Maryland, and Virginia, she set off for Iowa City, her current residence.
Image: Guilhem Vellut from Annecy, France, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
