Cosmological Litmus Test
Rosemarie Dombrowski
The calendar erupts into planetary rotations,
retrograde days and phases of the moon,
hours measurable by the cadence of stars.
He leaves stories of the Lakota
on her doorstep, mother grizzly
and the white buffalo, the woods a voice
whispering bodily migrations for centuries,
all of which she struggles to remember
until she convinces herself that Nirvana
that the lower Sonoran is a metaphor
for aimless drifting, her mind
a transmutation of the scorpion’s sting,
the cholla’s circulatory dance,
one that begins in her right ankle as pain
and repeats like an infinite chorus.
~~~~~
Rosemarie Dombrowski is the founder of rinky dink press and the inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix, AZ. Her collections include The Book of Emergencies, The Philosophy of Unclean Things, and the forthcoming The Cleavage Planes of Southwest Minerals [A Love Story], winner of the 2017 Split Rock Review chapbook competition.