Divining the Layers, by Christine Stewart-Nuñez

Strata, by Pauline Aitken (USA) contemporary. Click image for artist website.

​Divining the Layers
   
Lamina, the name for sedimentary rock thin as paper,
 paper similar to the sheets of my architect’s sketches,
  sketches of façades and walls and interior spaces, 
   spaces demarked by gradations, levels, or layers,  
    layers similar to those found in the tissue of plants--
     plants with dermal, ground and vascular strata:
      strata of bodies—heart, skin, and blood cells,
       cells communicating or not—the unordering neurons,
        neurons in my son’s brain underneath skin and skull,
         skull cupping labyrinth of fatty acids where cells fire,
          fire into subclinical seizures—data we capture and print,
           print on paper or study under microscopes or paint, 
            paint in a rainbow of colours on a surface thin as lamina. 
​
Christine Stewart-Nuñez

Christine Stewart-Nuñez is the author of Postcard on Parchment (ABZ Press 2008), Keeping Them Alive (WordTech Editions 2010), Untrussed (University of New Mexico Press 2016), and Bluewords Greening (Terrapin Books 2016), winner of the 2018 Whirling Prize. She is a Professor in the English Department at South Dakota State University and the South Dakota Poet Laureate. Find her work at christinestewartnunez.com.