LOGEN CURE

Permian Sea

Your father tells you

once all this was vast

inland sea, all mollusks

and trilobites, amphibians

bigger than your imagination.

He points westward, explains

the Guadalupe Mountains

are an enormous ancient reef.

All this, he says,

everything was water.

Then the sea

stagnated, temperature

skyrocketed, acid

rained from the sky,

everything died, the most

massive extinction

in recorded history.

All those fossils,

oil now. Of course.

You were born here,

native to the pasture,

spiny mesquites,

cracked red earth.

You imagine being born

underwater, born a suggestion

of what's to come, predecessor

of some greater thing,

or something so basic

it could survive

when earth starts over,

a nautilus, maybe,

all tentacles, no memory.

You dream of it, the sea

before its horrific death,

before millions of years

the sun blazed over lifeless desert.

Sometimes when you wake you think

you hear the waves. 

Logen Cure is a poet and teacher. She is the author of three chapbooks: Still (Finishing Line Press, 2015), Letters to Petrarch (Unicorn Press, 2015), and In Keeping (Unicorn Press, 2008). Her work also appears in Word Riot, Radar Poetry, The Boiler, and elsewhere. She's an editor for Voicemail Poems. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She lives in Texas with her wife.