The quake was born in Mineral, Virginia, with a magnitude of only 5.8, yet cracks appeared in the Washington Monument. The cathedral lost two pinnacles.

To explain the damage, seismologists will announce that we sit on only the thinnest layer of silts—weak ocean sediments—and beneath that, a hard, crystalline rock whose shaking energy creates an echo chamber of the soft mud.

I drive to the house you’ve lived in for as long as I’ve been alive, ninety miles north of Mineral, and park next to a spot where you used to grow snapdragons. I wait on the porch where geraniums once stood sentry, nodding their incomplete heads.

We walk the house together, straightening paintings. My mother has asked me to check the stove, to move dishtowels away from the burners, to look for mold in the fridge. You worry about getting things in order for the girls. No one knows who “the girls” are. What about the good china? The crystal flutes?

The dining table is cluttered, samovar hunkering in the corner. We peer through the cabinet’s leaded panes at teacups and gilded saucers, champagne coupes.

If I had not opened the door, they’d be there still. Instead, stacks of porcelain sag and swing, the fractures vertebral, an unstoppable popping. Someone always lets the earthquake out. You laugh, a kindness or symptom, as I kneel to gather what has broken.

Curator's notes

Niki Herd

I'm struck by the fragility in this poem. The fragility of nature and of being human, particularly as one grows older. I keep returning to the phrase "You laugh, a kindness or symptom. . . " The tight structure contrasts the narrative in ways allowing for both loss and expansion.