The word electrocution
didn’t exist until, in an effort to tarnish
the name of his competitor,
Thomas Edison began using
alternating currents to put small animals to death—
stray cats and dogs, at first,
before moving on to man.
Sparks were sent through the first
human body in 1890, and as his vessels
baked and bled, Edison imagined
the steady decline of his enemy’s empire;
the world’s attention shifting to him instead.
In the back of his mind was a girl
with faint ember resting
neatly atop her head; a crown of red
shining brighter than any flame,
and she was smiling at the thought of him.
Even as AC generators
began to light up Rome he raged
against them, sparking a war
that he ultimately lost and leaving
a legacy of evil in his wake.
One day, he knew,
the whole world could be lit
by alternating current.
In 1903, an elephant went mad,
her mouth burning
as she tried to put out
lit cigarettes with her tongue.
The earth quaked beneath her as she stomped
down on dirty ground, her body lit up
from the inside, sparks shooting
through it. In her rage
she killed the man who had force-fed her embers
and was sentenced to death.
Edison oversaw it, watching as thousands
of electrical currents were sent through her;
she trembled and fell to the ground,
her massive body still moving
as it pressed into soft earth, but no sound escaped
her. He recorded her death in black and white,
playing it back for anyone who could stand
to see it; the proof he needed to tarnish
the Westinghouse name
and put an end to alternating currents.
He remembered his own incandescence;
the feeling of being heated
from the inside out and imagined
a world set to that same
steady glow, lit by his own design,
her face shining brightest.
War of Currents
work in progress
Jamie Bruce currently lives in Harlem and is an MFA candidate at the City College of New York where she studies poetry. Her work has appeared most recently in the Spring 2013 issue of Promethean.