My Next Life Will Involve Volcanoes
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The body clamors like a religion of bells in this season of waiting in line, scrolling backwards— my thumb is sore from searching the past. I said I couldn’t be mean if I tried, then apologized. We were watching a documentary about volcanoes, and insights came sudden as soot, tephra: catchall for everything spat out still smoking from the other side. I decided my next life will involve eruption. The sting of mercury. A field of muted burning. The mountain is never just a mountain, extinct or asleep. The path is never the same path, from the mouth to the sea. Melt the words, let them flow white hot, same as the heat, always, miles beneath our feet. All that separates magma and lava is a threshold. Sometimes, everything I could say is the smoke, and sometimes it’s the burning. |
Carolyn Supinka is a writer and visual artist from Western Pennsylvania. Her work has been published in Hobart, Radar Poetry, and Sixth Finch, and is forthcoming in Ecotone and Birdcoat Quarterly. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where she creates poems, comics, and prints, and works as an arts administrator and as co-editor of Conjunction, a zine micropress.