Tracy Zeman


Sea


Skeletons & sunken
impressions burrows tracks
correlating with rock sequences
graptolites in deepwater
shales & shallow limestones
as films of carbon
on bedding planes     the delta

heaped in thin

severances     as field
of history     as the sea
transgressed & regressed
over land bare & pitted
slain marked O     here we
subsume continents &
drift copper     blanketlike

bodies found in

conglomerates
barbarous echo dust
carried southward by glaciers
will you     some silver
is found within     gaps
where the sea withdrew

brachiopod shell into

shoal     only
a short time
from narrative & primitive
lungs     words &
things     small units
built up century
over century     knower &
known

wrapped in ongoing

reconfigurations of the world
a performative accounting
my body & yours
a hard record
ice flowing under
its own weight leaves
an apron

of outwash


Tracy Headshots-6 edited copy.jpg

Tracy Zeman's first book, Empire, recently won the New Measure Poetry Prize from Free Verse Editions. Her poems and book reviews have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly and others. She lives outside Detroit, Michigan, with her husband and daughter, where she hikes and birds watches in all seasons.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2021