Sierra Granodiorite                                                                      —Eloise Schultz


With this continent between us, I come to assume that
I have already told you everything. That a fault is only fault
as far as you consider emergence to be a product of displacement

and not desire. When knowledge surfaces like a field in ruins, as if
the ground had unburied itself to its grey underbelly. Not a rend
but a yawn of rubble and roughage, lifeless but not dead, never

having been alive, never having tasted ocean. Bearing
away from the paleoshores at the rim of fault. Hornblende,
biotite. Bloody canyon. Passing names for substance underfoot.

When you ask me if our uncle ever hurt me. I can hear your mouth
twist unbidden on the phone. At the edge, fault. A scale that cannot
be understood. I recite the names of our gods. Of this mythology.

The fault is deafening. What bleeds. What decays. What it is to be
as honest as I can. To weather your questions. To be searched,
to be sought out. To become evidence. The saprolite open

like an onion, sloughing its petals through
my life and yours, and yours, and yours.


Eloise Schultz

Eloise Schultz teaches and studies rocks in Oregon. Her work can be found in Terrain.org and A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. As the 2019 Eliot Fellow at the Mount Desert Island Historical Society, she writes about history, collections, and containers. She is an MFA candidate at Oregon State University.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2019