Glacial

Say that just this once,

I cast my worries star-ward,
to slip between the joints of some glacier’s icy knuckles.

See the way they knead and fold the land, shaping it with their weight?
As if it were a soft dough to be changed then devoured.

Suppose in that cold blue space
—that crack in time—
the weight of this all released—
pack ice breaking up beneath a northern sky.

Consider, then, how my body swells with light.
Unfiltered and ancient.

Braid in my hair.
Stone in my belly.
My spine a stack of pebbles.
A distant floe on a cold and salty sea.

It must be terrible, I think, to have always been here.

 

–Lauren Kukla