THE LANGUAGE OF LAVA by Chuck Rybak

Around your neck

rest round black rocks      just take their word

that they’re volcanic      born of heat

The liquid earth

like your aspirations       soon form

on their own      without sculpting hands

accept this future ground

its firmness a timeline beyond life

stand on what’s been made

The best you can do is break pieces

fashion them after fashion

create after creation

Like the language in your mouth     lava stones

formed in invisible worlds

something on your tongue from before the time 

of electricity      no shock or charge

a jewelry of talk

Here was the forest      they cut the forest

now here is the forest again

to go there and sit silently

in an envelope

of almost silence      trying to cast that far back

into the perfect dark 

Chuck Rybak lives in Wisconsin and is a Professor of English, Writing, and Humanities at the University of Wisconsin—Green Bay, where he coordinates their prison education initiative. He is the author of two chapbooks and two full-length collections of poetry. Chuck also writes on Substack as The Declining Academic.