Two Poems by Rebecca Helton

Anatomy & Physiology

a storm arrives, and you

suggest we take shelter

in the house, safe from the sound,

the tempest's furious advance

the lightning flashes white

outside every window

you hold your breath

until the thunder releases it.

our bodies are as storms

electrical impulses the only

things that that animate us

that separate living from dead

our movements lighting

our words thunder

our souls houses

caught always (please) in the storm.

Continental Drift

Did Pangaea grieve when she was torn apart?

Or was it, in the end, a relief to drop the entire world from her back and let

Panthalassa enter her rift-formed valleys, wash her cool waters over infant beaches?

Pangaea was not the first to lose her children this way;

the examples of Pannotia, Rodinia, and Columbia before her

must have been a comfort to place against the excruciating fire

of continental plates ripping themselves apart inside her,

the pain of birth in fact always the pain of loss, however many millennia it must take—

Panthalassa could not understand, connected as she always is to her children.

The mindless conqueror of land will never mourn what she floods,

but in her saltiness—Pangaea's tears.