"Heavy Duty Reliquary" by Jill Bergantz Carley

Heavy Duty Reliquary

I’ll tell you about a batholith.
Bulk of mountains a single structure made of granite, 
cooled in the earth’s mantle for millions and millions of years 
and then pushed to the surface. 

The backbone of my state was born premature,
heart of heat crystallizing in the belly of the world. 

Near here there is a magma cast of an entire river.
I’ll tell you how it happened;
there was the lava crowding out the water running headlong fifty miles,
teapot tipped, cup overflowing,
then erosion carving through the soil soft surrounding it
the once-river’s new flow firm like the pit of a cling peach.

Tell me, please, the story of what happened 
to each fish held in those waters, evaporating
spherical lenses untrained to this novel aberration.
I picture a coelacanth cast in homemade plaster.
I picture the predecessors of crawdads settling,
amniotic aufferous gravels,
perfectly born, but still.

Jill Bergantz Carley

Jill Bergantz Carley is a multiple Pushcart-nominated poet, living in Northern California. Her work has been published recently by Tupelo Press, Silver Needle Press, Collective Unrest, ENTROPY, Back Patio Magazine, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, ANIMAL VEGETABLE MINERAL, is forthcoming from UnCollected Press in 2020. She tweets @jbergantzcarley and lives online at jillbergantzcarley.com.

Headshot: Jill Bergantz Carley

Photo Credit: Staff