Not every body plan was successful. Not every pet turtle can make sense of an origin story. Not everyone remembered the soft bodies. We can’t eliminate our sense of what may have radiated. What appears in the record. What is glimpsed in the frond of the fossil. What a thawing the earth has done. What is means to be on the cusp of something, an age or a time or a look even further through the body. Curious fragments of once-thriving last thought you have before bed. Before a body on a bed. Before a body on the deepest part of the deepest in the deepest kind of record. You can’t dream up a time like this. You can’t appear in the memory. What our children will do in the dying of the heat of the waves. What isn’t even established. Are the children animals. Are they yours. Who is thawing. What is underneath this floor. Take another look at your watch. Take another glimpse at what is precious. Do we say strange form or failed experiment. Do we say messing up with the movements of translucency. My mud-filled bag or quilted mattress. What you want to compare your thought to in order touch this. Go to sleep. Wake up an earth in alarm. What it means to press your finger next to something almost living this one last time.

Emily Koehn’s poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Conduit, FENCE, Juked, Waxwing, Crazyhorse, Cincinnati Review, Vinyl, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and Best New Poets. She has her MFA from Purdue University and MSW from the University of Houston. Emily currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri, and teaches at Washington University.

This piece was originally published in Salt Hill 44.