Mary Quade

Chalk

My snail thoughts smooth
across the slate, white
residue of theory on my fingers.
Why is the word
inkling, when only chalk
is capable of hints?
The problem I propose you solve
dissolves beneath the eraser, its felt indifference.
The sound of my lessons—
arrhythmic castanets.
Somewhere a man who hasn’t been to
school mixes with his hands a bucket of slurry,
pours it in the mold,
brass and honeycombed with tubes—
each a piece of chalk, a cocoon.
Are you confused?
Let me draw a diagram. Here
is the phytoplankton,
its skeleton ball of CaCO₃.
And on this timeline here it dies 100
million years ago,
sinks, sediment in layers
like this.
Here we have
quarry, explosives.
And here, forgotten mine, sinkhole.
The gymnast of my brain needs chalk
to keep its grip.
Weigh a new stick in your palm:
all the bones of things,
outlines of bodies, ghostly
maps. If you need a second piece of it,
just squeeze and it will snap.

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Mary Quade is the author of Zoo World: Essays (The Ohio State University/Mad Creek Books), winner of The Journal Non/Fiction Prize, and two poetry collections, Guide to Native Beasts (Cleveland State University Poetry Center) and Local Extinctions (Gold Wake). She’s the recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship and four Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards for both poetry and creative nonfiction. She teaches at Hiram College in northeast Ohio.