by Zixiang Zhang
walk your shadow across the feldspar of our mother’s orogen,
her grits beveled, though light softens
a tine fracture—
i am worn with pleasures the old continent sheds.
massifs rise & sink for wear & i, seeking orthogneiss despite lava shedding
crysts & crypts making their nudes undress, want into telling;
i walk past facies of a day in the kitchen
ahead of water cresting in the arms of my neighbor,
whose breathing quickens to a ravenous moan & pyroclastic flows.
seeing her, in pewter some mornings after
reading a mica book millennia bound together, turn pages in the storied center,
playa gathers what her heart dislodges from glass harbor.
i tear away the moss & mulch; beside her breasts, before moon-silver pinches
tongue & shrivels to a copper hull, i lay a kiss upon her door.
two lamps unveil a rock garden beneath a window
so precipitous that sill freezes mid-unfurling;
marigolds are saved for someone seeing.
saved from what of whom exactly?
Zixiang Zhang (he/him/his) has poems published in Cathexis Northwest, Consilience, Pedestal, The Nature of Our Times, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality, Magpie Zine, Sonora Review, and others. He holds an undergraduate degree in geology from Stanford University and masters degrees from UC Berkeley and the American Museum of Natural History. Once, he published research on brachiopod evolution in the journal Paleobiology. Now, he teaches Earth science at a small high school in NYC and enjoys dry gardening, erging, sunbathing, and sundry. He may be active @zzverse.