Along the Path of the Triassic

Petrified Forest, Arizona


In the dawn of the dinosaurs, a conifer topples,
is captured by a river, smothered in mud
for two hundred million years
and then returned to land, its core
transformed to stone, heartwood turned opal and jasper.

The shape of the tree remains, like the armature
of a sculpture, or the bone
structure of a familiar face—your first love,
the cherished cat who sits on your shoulder and watches
the computer’s cursor twitch like a whisker,
and stares out the window at a kingbird

without considering the broom of time that
sweeps every living thing
away, and returns us to the earth, where we imagine
ourselves a raindrop, wave of grass or
gust of wind arranging the blue mesa.

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Jennifer Markell’s first poetry collection, Samsara (Turning Point), was named a "Must Read" by the Massachusetts Book Awards in 2015. Her second collection, Singing at High Altitude, was published in 2021 by Main Street Rag. Jennifer’s poems have been published in The Bitter Oleander, Cimarron Review, Consequence, Diode, RHINO, and The Women's Review of Books. She works as a psychotherapist and lives in the Boston area with her husband and two securely-attached cats.