In 1811 the New Madrid earthquakes were a series of magnitude 7.7 earthquakes that occurred in Missouri along the Reelfoot Rift that lies under the Mississippi alluvial plain.
It was the year the bank called
and we suddenly noticed
the cracks in the plaster,
the fissure between the bricks,
the silence behind the meadowlarks,
the useless rustling of leaves.
The year you said love requires a home
and pointed to the buckled ceiling,
the inadequacy of the way
we arranged letters into words,
words over feelings.
The year you stopped baking,
let our ribs jut forth like flimsy frames,
The year we noticed the ant hills had become vacant;
no more guilt
for carelessly arcing the mounds across the crumbling porch.
It was the year I wandered,
tried to navigate the crooked halls with my hands,
fingered the walls like a blind person.
Meanwhile you surveyed our fractured pastures,
a lone swallow fluttering against a steel gray sky.
Nothing to see but devastation.
This year I went back,
pulled into the ditch we once owned,
crawled down to the sediment-choked creek
and splayed my fingers on the surface,
breaking my reflection, shattering me
like the windows shattering in that old house.
Then I watched myself gather again
like the fields shifting in an unlikely earthquake—
the same but different.
