The new issue of Alaska Quarterly Review features a poem of mine called “Travertine.” Thank you so much to fantastic editor Ronald Spatz for graciously including it in AQR’s latest Spring/Summer ‘22 edition. The poem’s title comes from the geological phenomenon created when limestone’s eroded out of a larger geologic structure, giving the appearance of something like curtains or liquid rock (if you’ve seen Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone, you’ve seen travertine). The poem itself, however, is less concerned with rocks than with erosion, the erosion of older selves and what “fills in” the space where those older selves once resided. In this poem, as with many others, I had been thinking about beliefs, especially spiritual beliefs, and how new ones sometimes replace, sometimes grow on top of previous spiritual beliefs. Reading an article in a recent New York Times Style Magazine on ‘the sacred’ by Ligaya Mishan, I was struck by the following lines: “It is a banality of the modern day to say, “Nothing is sacred.” In fact, the opposite is true: Secularism has not banished the sacred but made it infinite. Unmoored from religion, we flail for meaning and seek new forms of exaltation.” I, too, have often found it difficult to confine the sacred. So, I suppose this poem is an attempt then not at localizing and restricting the sacred from the non-sacred, but identifying the new places in which the sacred has left its deepest impressions in me.