Keystone

Abstract

Keystone Jennie Ziegler (bio) My teeth are asleep and kind. They bleach like limestone, crumble like slate. The old plates are merely lungs, long dormant, having breathed once, twice, long ago. My chest had lifted, my shoulder blades cracking together, pulled up and back. Volcanoes fell down my throat, swallowed into peace, their rumblings lost to other voices, the voices of ghosts who expose my fault lines with paths of asphalt and tar. [End Page 90] My arms reach over the horizon, bones snapping, pistons releasing, coal dust settling under my eyes, Appalachian iron ridging my backbone, and the bones, oh the bones, they are molten then hard, shined as steel. Pine needles collect as eyebrows, and hickory nuts for eyes, I am awakening, restless in my sleep, my glacier sheet pulled back, years, eons before. I am missing toes in Morocco, fingers in Scotland. The pin oaks, the box elder pods, the butternut trees, they whisper, dying hungrily around me, and shiver. Soot streams from my lashes into the Mighty Lehigh, filled with chips and fragments of my children—granite, glittery quartz. Carve dirt tongues along my skin. Paint my hair and nails with white marks. Call it Trail. They feed me to the steel stacks of Bethlehem, casting iron beams from my rib cage, warships from my lungs. My ashes drift through its towers, dispersing like bats, like the smattering of the dust of stars, settling back into my folds, my cavernous mouths. From clouds, I drift back to myself, a great tumbling of stone. [End Page 91] Jennie Ziegler Jennie Ziegler, a Pennsylvania native, received her MFA from the University of Arizona and currently lives and teaches in the Southeast. Her work has appeared in Luna Luna Magazine, Atlas and Alice, and Gingerbread House Literary Magazine. Copyright © 2018 Berea College