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 director of Artsmith, a nonprofit to support the arts. She is the recipient of the Paula Jones Gardiner Award in Poetry, and four Pushcart nominations for poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Los Angeles Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Harpur Palate. She earned her MFA from Pacific Lutheran University, and is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Nebraska. She is editor of the forthcoming anthologies from the University of Nebraska Gender Programs Becoming: What Makes a Woman, and Being: What Makes a Man.
All work by Jill McCabe Johnson
