North American Plate

Concealed by five hundred

Generations of moss

An unspoken testament

To metamorphosis stilled

Is compressed by my specificity

Gravity is less severe this far north

A scent of citrus pervades

A wind to which it does not belong

Prevailing dreams of ignoble progress

From left and right converging

Continents devouring each other

In a Richter scaled ritual

Rent by breath to raise

A dialogue of at most fear

Said a menstrual stratum

Lying to mount and birth

And pull a part

ing of an inch each

Millennium in

The sabotage of separation

Undone on other borders

I walk awhile with what remains

Of a sheep bone white

In this trench not yet of tears

A flower for my living sister

And one for the other

As I bend to write the names of the dead

In the youngest rock on earth

The crowberries stain

My fingers a feast for corvids

As I carve a sand castle

From crumbled crystal cast

aways in this rift unscarred

By glacial prede lick

shun sun and stone

Feeding a sea that covers

All that time and tectonics

Cannot erase

Eurasian Plate

Two pale flowers,

One for my dead sister

And one for my live,

Broke the heather held

By moss generations’ deep

A smell of lemon borne on an Arctic wind

Caused me to pause as

Such singular citrine scent

Defies limits to roam,

A stark and invasive censer

A crow well-kept watched me

Death is larger and deeper here

Mirmir’s eyed unblinking as I lay

The effigies of children not yet born to sleep

Causing the insubstantial to stir amidst

Trails of contractions and trials of fault

Lines walked by the unseen

In mounting pressure to break beneath the wait of a

planet breathing bright blood

To baptize bone built

Of porous progressions

I found Aurore tied below

The centuries of twisted branches

Shunning sky to grow close to earth

Listening to the magma smoldering still

I knelt to the forgotten song reverberating

In hollow spaces held by basalt

To drink that discarded breath

For I will drown

In this trough of milk, the artery

That breeds all dark and dreaming spaces

And fertilize tectonic trenches traced to separate

Some ocean-filled and

Some containing the gaseous mist that

Quenches Scent and memory where

Drifts the dust of pollen and predation

That intermingle in the descendants

Of a monohued meteor