The Little Girl and the Bear Work a Puzzle of the Earth

And the North Wind, with her trumpet and star strewn hair is their favorite. Then the pod of blue whales wrapped along the western shoreline. The little girl assures the bear, some day the parent people will come back. The bear does not care and thinks only of the ice floe and how cold seems like it would be silent, but he believes it’s more like static—a hum electric that occasionally cracks fantastic. Now the little girl is working on a double-decker bus, the red pieces like berries in her fingers. She can’t get the bus to fit back on the continent. The continent. Everything is coming apart, but this is only one way to look at it. The little girl likes the idea of burying the cardboard pieces in the yard so everything can return; un-colonized layers of paper and fabricated inks, washing back, year after year into the sediment, into the marrow of buried bones.

 
 
 

Amelia Martens is the author of The Spoons in the Grass are There To Dig a Moat, a book of prose poems selected by Sarabande Books for the 2014 Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature. Her chapbooks include: Purgatory (Black Lawrence Press, 2012), Clatter (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2013), and A Series of Faults (Finishing Line Press, 2014). She's an adjunct instructor at WKCTC, where she helps to edit Exit 7: A Journal of Literature and Art.