Issue Nineteen - Winter 2012

Day Floor-Fault

By Jill McCabe Johnson

Where sea grounds bow skyward,
waters boil. Dome of heat and stretch,
as rifts and junctions
budge the wombly crust
like wrinkles in turtle’s neck.
But for every burgeoning, compaction.
Rock into rock pushing magma
up Mountain’s igneous spring.

“Day Floor-Fault” comes from a series of poems entitled “Diary of the One Swelling Sea.” In these persona poems, I imagined what the sea might say if he kept a journal. Each poem begins with the word “Day” to indicate the daily entries in his journal.

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Copyright Johnson 2012

Jill McCabe Johnson is the author of the poetry collections Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown, Pendulum, and Diary of the One Swelling Sea, and the nonfiction chapbook Borderlines. She is the founder and publisher of Wandering Aengus Press, and teaches English at Skagit Valley College.

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