"This Thing Of Ours" by Julia Shipley

Shark teeth, petrified wood, lump of crystalline.And so?Teeth of shark “killed off coast of Labrador.” Oh.Petrified wood from “the petrified forest where huge trees…lie just as they were buried years agoby the lava of St. Helena which turned them to stone so neatlythat the variety of wood may still be distinguished.”The lump? From “the forest of Fontainebleau.”For 50 years Simpson Library’s absentee show and tellhas featured personal effects of Mrs. Finn, Mrs. Lucian Day,Mrs. Frederick Slicer, and now all that’s known of Mr. Estelleare his shells from Galilee. But the trophy is “Stalactitefrom Endless Caverns” which you can picture:childless Miss Simpson swaddling in her blouse,tucking in the sanctum of her trunkto deliver us this mineral tusk, her petrified tear,you could place it in the palm of someone who refusedto conceive an ordinary grief and say, Here.Girl of 2075 gazing at these items set asidewith you in mind, will the petrified ripplescombed in mudstone remind you of “lovely flowing hair?”

Julia Shipley is the author of The Academy of Hay, winner of the Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize, forthcoming in 2015. Her first prose book Adam's Mark, was supported by a Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant and named a 2014 Best Book About New England by The Boston Globe. Her work has recently appeared in Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Green Mountains Review, North American Review, Poetry and The Rumpus.