Mary Christine Delea’s poems have been published in 1 full-length collection, 3 chapbooks, and many journals and anthologies. She is a former university professor, and she now leads online poetry workshops as well as in-person workshops in the Portland, Oregon area.

Love Song: Plate Boundaries

“Transform faults are the one kind of plate boundary where
        volcanism is essentially absent.”—Barbara J. Tewsbury

We are strike-slip faulting—
I the sinistral and you dextral—
passing by one another with our complaints,
grinding more earth into the void between us,
hoping for a hot spot.
None exists.

We are Mesa, eternally empty of the possibility
of volcanoes, all heat and lava,
our boundaries too thick,
too stable and set,
to transform into anything raucous.
Volcanic eruptions pass us by.

Seduction won’t happen.
Rifting is absurd.

We no longer have any strong motions.
I have been on this path for eons, it seems—
rupture is all I know now.
I cannot turn into San Francisco,
shifting and spitting, compressing and accelerating,
in spite of what I thought
I would always feel—the earth moving
each time I looked at you.