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  • The Fossil
  • Erik A Mueller (bio)

Winner of the 2017 AWP Intro Journal Project in Poetry, selected by Leona Sevick

He’ll spend all day outside smashing rocks. In one-hundred-degree heat, he found this one. Inside. It’s part of his story. More than once men broke his mother this way and she got back up. The fine spines of the shell build over this boy each time he has to watch their fists from the doorframe, his mother crying out. I will not say her tears are part of an ocean, although we know there was a sea. Her tears came after the water left and the land dried, and mothers were forced to walk long miles while their children and husbands, their own mothers and fathers walked too. Not many would expect to find a shell inside the memory of this rocky mountain. No one should expect to find such terrible hardness inside another. [End Page 133]

Erik A Mueller
Cherokee Nation, Oklahoma
Erik A Mueller

Erika Mueller received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. She is also an alum of the University of Oregon, Iowa State University, and AmeriCorps. Her poems have recently appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Midwest Review, and the Grief Diaries.

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