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There are Volcanoes in Iceland
I bought a guide book about Iceland but have no money to travel.
The book boasts of twenty-four hours of sunlight in summer, the Northern Lights
in winter, and every four to five years: volcanic eruptions.
I want to trek to the rims of these volcanoes.
They must look like chalices toasted
by tectonic plates, their lava must taste like red wine.
They bubble like witches’ caldrons, stirring up trouble,
and I want to toil in molten and ash and sulfur.
I hover over boiling water and bask in steam,
I open the oven and lean in to the heat
like horse shoe magnets attracted to opposite poles
and know that this is not the same. This is safe. This
needs geothermal energy and magma and catastrophe.
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Annaliese Wagner is a student at Stephen F. Austin State University. She has appeared in her undergraduate journal HUMID as well as in The Blue Route, Far Enough East, and is forthcoming in The Blue Lyra Review. Read more of her work here.
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