The Geologist

[After Simone Muench]

                  for Kelsey F

Rock girl, bone girl, pebbles-on-the-playground girl, where once you believed a ludicrous lie because I told it. You the fulcrum between siblings, the pendulum between parents, counterbalance to your best, freckled friend. You and I squamata* girls, flat-footed, nearsighted, same height, sitting on the school bus, side by side, our skins itching. You skittering, stone by stone, further away from your disappointed house down the road. In an airplane, the two of us eighteen, shedding over the ocean. You picked your way through a crumbled castle you loved for its reticence. Our trajectories separating, narrowing. Photos of you clinging to crevices, hanging by ropes and helmeted, of you all over the globe, leaving textured, translucent selves behind. You quilt yourself mosaic, beveling broken edges. We research the complexities of our climate with fingertips, smell it with blue tongues. To me, it is ink-laced; to you, granulated. We seam ourselves back together, cradle each other’s voices between our shoulders and our ears, states apart. Granite girl, chiseling the world to fit you, always scaling.

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^* An order of scaled reptiles.

Kara McKeever

Kara McKeever is a writer, editor, and artist living in Kansas City, Missouri. Her work has appeared in Cutleaf, Ninth Letter, North American Review, Cimarron Review, Contemporary Collage Magazine, UPPERCASE, and elsewhere. Find her on Instagram (@karammck) or at www.karamckeever.com