Bryan Roessel

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Bryan Roessel is a poet/science teacher with the most attractive beard you’ve ever seen. In addition to hosting a monthly poetry slam in Suffern, NY, he competed at the 2012 National Poetry Slam on the White Plains team. His poetry is mostly about girls, sadness, and rocks.

POEMS

• Breakup

RECENT ARTICLES

BREAKUP

can you feel me
drifting away
slowly?

five centimeters a year may not seem like much
but it’s enough
if you have the time

and what’s a million years between you and me?
we have spanned eons

i remember
how it used to be

i was laurasia and
you were gondwana and
we raced toward each other, continental shelves outstretched
folded into each other
knit our edges into appalachia

we were orogeny
and together we built mountains
and we were pangaea
and dinosaurs lived on us
and mammals began on us
but
neither mountains nor the mesozoic is forever;
each is no less ephemeral than
the cafe up the street that closed or
the ladybug on my windowsill in spring

something changed
somewhere deep down
something shifted
somewhere dark and secret
and no seismologist can say what set these things in motion

maybe some current in this core has shifted

maybe it started millenia ago and we are only now feeling it

but however it happened,
we began to rift
drift apart
like east africa we are torn-scab earth
and the lakes and volcanoes that appear between us
are only the start of a nascent sea, as
magmatic dikes splay through me and
i let myself be torn free from you and

soon an ocean divides us
and you are no longer the gondwana i loved
but far off africa and

your granite is foreign to me but

i still bear the mark of you and
whatever collisions are yet to come,

you are a part of this craton

no matter how hard i scrub with wind or water, cover with overthrusts, fault, fracture, or intrude with plutons,

nothing i can do
can completely remove you

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