From the pit emits
a sulfurous blast,
the steamed leavings
of oil, and all the men
are baptized black,
as they strike it big,
all that drilling no longer in faith,
their works culminating
in bankable carbon—
And I, sick in bed with a flu,
imagine this thing I have never seen—
all those men dancing
in dark, vaporous rain, dreaming
of distant and loud and wonderfully expensive trains—
they cannot yet fathom cars, planes—
and I see some alchemist
whose dusty mutterings now are consigned to books,
whispering formulas to find gold,
and how the American west would shatter him
with its philosophy of breaking open the earth,
whispering nothing, but taking wealth loudly and with force.
But still I like it, the broken world we’ve made,
and I think how oil rigs look, from a distance,
like the scaffolding of castles,
such splendid spires constructed on
stained, putrid pasture, and in my feverish brain,
I am there, and I see the sprawled, exhaling
earth with a surveyor’s entitlement, a feminine
grasping—make it mine. Make it all mine.
Let no oil burble up unbothered. Let it all
be put to work, to propel my car, to gloss
my lips, to clothe me bright white,
without any trace of the black that enabled the shine.
Micah Cozzens is a North Carolina native. She attended BYU, where she received an MFA in fiction in 2020. She recently graduated with a PhD in poetry from Ohio University. Her work has appeared in The Rat’s Ass Review, Inscape, and Jersey Devil Press, and is forthcoming in Time of Singing. Her first book-length collection, Emily, is expected in 2026 from By Common Consent press.
