V E R S E and I M A G E

I tell my sons that sometimes the land shifts.

The creature of it rising

on one shoulder, regardless

of how solid

it once seemed.

Each summer, I drive them

through land they didn’t grow up in—

far enough West my eyes snag

on fault lines, trace my own

rough edged, raised up scars

like a tongue tracing teeth—

a step into air

I thought was ground.

My grandfather called them scarp—

these old land wounds—

I though he’d made the word up

like how he called me Squidunk

and my sister, Pipsqueak.

Years and years he sold typewriters

out of his car, through Montana, Wyoming,

Utah, Idaho. Wide plains and then dark rock

here and there like cliffs, a river

snaked like its name

clear through, hills–

all mumbled haunches,

mounded shoulders, giving way

to rocky edges and, closer to the road,

rock spine stacked—

maybe the Lost River Fault

or the Sawtooth or the Big Flat

or just some unnamed stretch of earth

where it once faltered.

My grandfather, his actual end,

took 10 solid days.

His hands, stammering

on the end of stick-like arms.

At the very last, he extended

his right hand to his wife

of 64 years and introduced himself.

It was only a summer or two ago

I learned escarpment:

a line of cliffs, formed by a faulting,

or a fracturing, of the earth’s crust.

Or, more simply, scarp—

not a made-up word

but one which plays close friends with scrap

as in scrap of land or scrappy,

another word for determined,

like my grandfather, my sons, me—

this is land language

meaning rock, meaning exposed fault line,

meaning the land rose up

and there, just here—

you can see how big the shift was.

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My catty-corner neighbor

erected a life-sized, rusted tin moose

at the edge of her lawn where it zeroes

my backyard. The past three mornings,

I’ve double-took this two-dimensional bull

for an alpha buck, indigenous white tail,

sporting an out-of-season rack

in the late April fog of the Anthropocene

we call the vague now. Algonquin

for eater of twigs, English for giant mammal

who would stomp your brains out

if given half a chance, who has never once

loped among these Appalachian conifers,

not wandered this range presently subdivided

and HOA’d as Greenbrier Pines, not in

the Pleistocene nor before. English for beast

who should be more feared than the grizzly

but isn’t thanks to L.L. Bean socks,

flannel sheets, and this yard ornament.

Meanwhile, the fat ticks waiting in the grass

do not care what name they’ll give the next epoch

coursing, even now, in their tiny grenade bodies,

in everything except this watchful moose that,

if it could, would say, This is not my beautiful house.

❀    ❀    ❀

I return again, having leaned from snails

about time. It’s slimy. It’s slow. It spirals.

One year ago I thought all kinds of things

would have happened by now. It’s quieter

than I remember, because I am quieter,

having learned from water about language:

how it builds, how it takes away.

You can make people disappear with it.

Yesterday I hiked to a stream and spread

a blanket on the earth. For hours I watched

the woods. For hours I didn’t think

about my son. I didn’t count his eyelashes

in the grass, his freckles on the leaves.

I didn’t think about how to mother

this child who loves guns. I studied the earth

in her mothering, how she holds

our endless tragedies, and only lets go

when we explode into stars.

❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀

Today the Environmental Protection Agency killed the last remaining regulation / restriction / monitoring of emissions from coal-burning power plants and officially changed its name to the Environmental Obliteration Agency. Today I clicked Settings on my browser and clicked off every switch that even whispered artificial intelligence and from here on out I will just have to take my chances with my own so-called intelligence. Today the last red-eyed vireo of summer before it flies to Belize wanted me to hear it singing in the top of the white oak down the ridge but the neighbor to the north is pressure washing his deck and the neighbor to the south is mowing and the two-houses down neighbor is chipping branches from a white oak that he chain sawed because it was looking too hungrily at his roof.

Today I read the closing poem in Ecobloomspaces titled THESE ARE THE DAYS THAT MUST HAPPEN TO YOU by Namrata Kasaseneni and before I went back inside the house and closed the doors and the windows to escape mowers and chippers and pressure washers and alas vireos I began again with the opening poem of the anthology and re-read all the poems I had marked that give me a particle of hope for the beauty of this world and at least a few of the humans willing to share it with each other and with me and with every other creature.

Tomorrow I will need to read this book again.

❀

Ecobloomspaces: Poetry at the Intersection of Social Identity and Nature, Environment, and Place. Edited by Ken R. Harmon, Iron Oak Editions, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA; © 2025. Available from Iron Oak Editions –

Rebecca Brock, Idaho born, lives in Virginia with her family. Her first full length collection The Way Land Breaks is available from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

Sarah Elkins lives in southern West Virginia with her husband. She is the director of the West Virginia Interscholastic Cycling League where she works to get more kids on bikes

Julia C. Alter lives in Vermont with her son. Her debut full-length collection is Some Dark Familiar (Green Writers Press, 2024)

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