Fracking
Fracking
These are our apparitions: the sky gleans
towards gray, the mouths of caves
filled with quartz call.
How long before we are all fluent
in earth, our scarring stops? In an office
an engineer imagines molecules deep
past aquifers speak combustion
and churn engines and blasts sand
and benzene near the earth’s core
unloosens eons of errant natural gas
dormant underneath Pawnee Grasslands,
an oily ocean the size of Saudi Arabia still
and docile waits underneath the fossil beds
of mastodons and eohippus,
the knee-high horses,
first to run wild on the prairie,
underneath everyone’s water source,
underneath artifacts and evidence
of prehistoric campsites of Folsom man,
the Paleo-Indian inhabitants from 12,000 years ago,
underneath the final outpost
of the Colorado butterfly plant imperiled globally—
an ocean awaits to be split open
with mobile steel girders and slamming
concrete sleeves and fallible
and now acrid aluminum air irritates
and fire streams from water faucets
in the nearby suburbs.
The bonds of our cells
unhinge unleashing old
and new contagions and cover ups
the whole procedure deemed safe
while around the clock earth cracks open,
we tinker with tectonic plates.
Published in Cirque & Sky by Middle Creek Publishing & Audio.
