Jennie B. Ziegler
On Foundation Laying
Pampas furls under my skin. The air is slow, heavy with water. To think— once I was pressed, fired, and dried by brick and leveled asphalt, built up into an angular Dutch roof, deep with sloping eaves. My bones were steel, iron and carbon, culled from northern mountains softened from volcanic peaks down to rolling rock. Buildings scraped like nails toward the skylight. Rowhomes assembled like teeth.
Fire breaks, baker’s alleyways. A breath between. The aging of post-boom steel towns. What now? Dig deep into the mountains, begging coal. Tongues curl around vowels, flattening them like crunched cans.
At my most young, I was my most old. They called me Blue and South and ate me like a wild raspberry grin. Pink magnolia ears and dogwood eyes. Silver maple hair. Limestone, sandstone, quartz—quarries and coal pits and streambed sifting. Our doors protected with hedges of toxic yew. The mesic oak forest, dotted with thick canopy, dry and brittle leaves crunching underfoot, the ferns blooming like curled thoughts, like smoke, like first love. Lehigh, Lehigh, Lehigh. Forked land and rivers. Lenape’s earth.
The giant American chestnut all but myth, struck by blight, all but a god in its healing of lungs and skin. Now just ghosts of titan trees.
They hid a copper-and-tin Bell with us, full of empty sound, long before a crack slivered up.
I bled into the edges of blue spruce forest, fingertips dusting purple flox, memory inked there, like a stain.
So I carried myself west. Set my skin to heat. My desert tongue. A home home home.
My insides raw with want.
Ironwood skeletons against Sonoran skylines. Adobe painted bright as bird wings.
I slid my feet into sculpted leather boots, curving up from hard hammered heels. The sun melted in a quick oven. Velvet mesquite scent-lined smoke. The monsoons shivering down the Santa Catalinas, safe as hunched shoulders.
This is what it was like to fall in love. To line lungs with red dust, erasing coal black.
I had to leave again, to fold and iron my stories. New trails with cairns of grief.
I left a bed frame, a life, orange blossom skin.
I am taken east. Past the Sky Islands, the sandhills, the Mississippi.
East east east.
Now—I hear the hungering of waves. I smell the brined death of kelp.
My father’s name translates to brick layer but he worked with the cousin-mortar between, the connective tissue—greyed cement. Concrete. Concretus. Con: together. Crescere: to grow. His clothes, dusted white. Like lunar surface, like volcanic ash, it followed him, stole into his pockets, into the cracks of our lives.
My fingers stained in ink.
When he passed, I found meteorites in his pockets, geodes in his shoes.
I am always awake in mirrors.
Rising, these knobbed knees of cypress, these dramatic palms.
Trees walk across my yard in the dark.
Wrap my skin in sea grape leaves, their red veins mimicking my blue.
The wet pine flatwoods. The coastal dunes. The swaying, gossipy sawgrass.
The mothers of my mother’s mother, once standing on lowland Scottish shore, blueberries dying hands blue, their feet on sandstone and granite, Dalradian rocks lined like the bellies of trees, those lines marking their own stomachs, as daughter produced daughter. They may have waulked wool. Wrapped against the wet. They may have sang.
Lungs, full sail.
The First Coast. Shades of green narrow to grey here. The craggy and waxy cocoplum. The imported palms. Spider lilies and red sage. Black mangrove heartwood. Tupelo honey. The crepe myrtles drape us in rosy blooms. Tongues dipped in syrup and tea. The railroad vines, the dune-crawling morning glories. Attempting grass, a thick ghost of what I once knew. It takes so much and so little to live here. This jungle of spines. The wind-whipped beaches, feet crashing sandcastles so hatchling turtles find their way back.
Clay, silt, sand. Water, underground, beneath me. Savannas cresting, swamplands rising.
What now?
I dig down into the earth, my hands searching for rocks to stack—a marker, a post, an unlit lighthouse. To build, to craft, to fire.
A strange grief to find only sand and coquina and coral, water rushing through, compacting, pressing, filtering. A cement, born of water tasting like tears.