Buy You a Drink
By: Michal Zweig
i did the dishes for the first time in two weeks.
by that i mean i washed Tupperware, previously filled with food stolen from my college’s dining hall, in a drinking fountain outside my dorm room.
when i opened one container that had stored fruit and been occupied with a small pool of cantaloupe and honeydew juice for just over a week, my flesh, blood, and soul were overcome with a putrid stench.
it was of facultative respirators, more specifically known as yeast cells. they had found a home in the waters of my long-gone fruit. once the oxygen had run out, they did something I, as a mere human, could never do – make energy by alcohol fermentation.
they took their reduced forms of sugars, cleaved a carbon dioxide molecule off each one, popped a hydrogen off an energy storage molecule, tacked it on to the carbon dioxide lacking reduced sugar molecule, and wound up with alcohol alongside an oxidized energy storage molecule.
there was a whole world in my Tupperware container, and I was ending it the way God had done to Noah’s world. that putrid stench was the smell of life turning to alcohol and making just enough energy to keep a collection of simple organisms alive.
Picture by Elizabeth Lipuma (Volume 28 Issue 1)
MiNT, in an attempt to revisit our earlier publications, will be publishing pieces from older volumes of our magazine once every week. This week we’re looking at “Buy You a Drink” by Michal Zwig, which is a poem that combines with scientific processes to create a fun and light-hearted read. This piece was published in Volume 28 Issue 1 (Fall 2013) edition of MiNT. Click this to read more pieces from that magazine!
(I would also like to note that the original line breaks in this poem are different than the ones shown here due to a formatting issue. To read the original poem, click the above link. The poem is on page 6.)
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