Self-Portrait as Thermophile

I disciple the sulphur,
pray away eons shrouded
in steam, watch elk
graze the golden bowl,
earth part from earth.
How to translate
the body’s splash
away from the body?
I sew the same blue
at dusk as I do at dawn.
What falls into me dissolves
into pearls of flesh. A bear
pulped into scattershot
of iron and fur. Melted hooves
dribbling gloam. I mourn
chartreuse verses, Bible
with an arsenic spine,
petrified tree ringed white.
This heat is a kind
of forgetting, like blood
in a dark drawer
neat as folded napkins.

Dorsey Craft is the author of A Brief History of Accidental Inventions (Texas Review Press, forthcoming 2026) and Plunder (Bauhan Publishing, 2020), which won the 2019 May Sarton Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Adroit Journal, Copper Nickel, POETRY Magazine, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of North Florida and serves as assistant poetry editor at Agni.