Stephanie L. Harper grew up in California, attended college in Iowa and Germany, completed graduate studies and gave birth to her first child in Wisconsin, and lives with her husband and children and writes poetry in Oregon. Her debut poetry chapbook, This Being Done (Finishing Line Press), will be released in June 2018.

Dross

when the glacial lake outburst

flood scored the dawn of her

watershed

bones in the earth

she was meant to be everything

everything other than this

bottleneck of basalt
fugitives
frozen within
foramina
this stenosis
unsounding
the tributaries—

the cascades un-sung
hungering
the millennia—

this distended

motherless

mantle of belly & breasts burbled to pitch

//

Chimera

Had you been capable of opening
your eyes you’d have seen

that the obvious upside
to my unique coalescence

of scaly-headed tail caprid skull
leonine belly & three belching maws

was my reliable prescience
to forewarn of cataclysm but