(PROSE POEM)

GREENLAND

​ROBERT MILTNER

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You inconsequent continent. You giant island with your ice sheet in retreat. Rising heat raises the tidewaters and stones sleep new under the sun. Sea birds warm their wings for flight. Winter’s eons of frozen snow are white bats clinging to the sides of your shadowed crevices. You unmade bed and rumpled sheets. You distortion and destruction of uncountable centuries of stability. Volubility now rides high northern winds as your hungry sea eagles, patient in their thermal survey, note what moves from rock shadow to stone pile to collapsed cairn, exposed between in the sunlight. You site where raptors transform to folding feathered rocks, beak to talon, plummeting with surgical purpose. On the bleak lichened terrain your undecipherable runes regarding extinction remain: ravens pecking marrow from splintered bones. 

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Robert Miltner’s prose poetry collections are Hotel Utopia (New Rivers Press Many Voices Award), Orpheus & Echo (Etruscan Press, 2020), Eurydice Rising (Red Berry Editions Chapbook Award), and Against the Simple (Kent State University Press Wick Chapbook Award); his prose poems are included in Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice (Rose Metal Press, 2010), The Cast-Iron Airplane That Can Actually Fly: Contemporary Poets Comment on Their Prose Poems (MadHat Press, 2019), and The Prose Poem: An Introduction (Yale University Press, 2020). Miltner is Professor Emeritus of English at Kent State University and the NEOMFA.

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