Loveliest Fleeting Martha Silano
I kept the finite with me, tucked it in my shoe. Days went galloping by while it rattled off facts about mastodons and mammoths, men in clothes made of skins. Sometimes it pierced my foot, clovis-point reminder of the opposite of smooth, cozy in my clean-sheeted bed. It wasn’t friendly, but I listened anyway through all four seasons. Instead of a mouth it had mold. Instead of arms, a placard: “Ammonite, Bothell, Washington, seventy million years before present.” Instead of lips a scream. Wedged in my shoe like the clay tablet containing the first written words, chafing like the first minted coin. Fixing to bang it out, this seed lying dormant a thousand years before sprouting. Fixing to pry it away from my arch as it asks me: Who was your great grandmother’s mother? Where did she live? What did she eat?
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