Felicia Zamora
NOT ON GEOLOGICAL TIME
Summer synapses to your lips. You utter summer for Summer Lake
watching the yellows & oranges push up the blues, the purples, grays
until only a memory of night remains. Whisper after wake. We all—once
was-es. An aortic value clenches. An aortic valve gapes. Until. Cease
exists in the mind again, roiling over & over. An aortic valve clenches.
An aortic valve gapes. Our fleshy contradictions. Make a truth walk
then what? Follow her around with a magnifying glass? Hope not
to burn her limbs by lingering too long in the sun’s angles? We all
ants to someone. Holders of the glass to another. Angles depend
on starting points, point of view, positionality. Accidentally transpose
the le—angels in our midst again. The silhouette of a mountain range
digs truth in geological time. Did you know you were writing about truth?
In geological time, stability—for a while—working toward a type
of whittling away. Ordovician knows. Paleogene knows. Tectonic
plates smash together & this range, that range. Blink. Blink. Peaks
understand the wind, the snow, the rain takes them back, carves
their bodies down to transparent outlines; outlines where vestigial
molecules memory in the interior of bird clavicles, bird sternums, bird
alulae from the Paleogene period alive today. Do these birds soar
around a mass long extinct? Does the Earth’s magnetic field gift eons of remember
in their small bones? Memory a type of transparent outline in pulse;
a pulse written here too—Summer Lake when my eyes close. Night
from minutes before. For seconds. Seconds. Seconds cast upon
eyelids. Then vanish. Your body not on geological time: your body
on water time—a flow, a movement influenced by watery cells—held
& disobeying. Not an element to drink. The only element to drink &
again you obsess with ingestion/digestion. Did the ammonites know
extinction in umbilical seams? Taste fossilization in the wet? You lick
your lips at the wonder, at the full blaze of morning sun over the high
desert terrain. Oregon wind. Playa. Lake of sand. Playa. Lake of once-was.
FELICIA ZAMORA is the author of six poetry collections, including I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the 2022 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. She has received fellowships and residencies from CantoMundo, Ragdale Foundation, and Tin House. She won the 2022 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize from The Georgia Review, a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International. Her poems appear in Best American Poetry 2022, Boston Review, Guernica, The Nation, Orion, and Poetr. She is an associate professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for Colorado Review.
