stretched

from her home on the North Sea

East over the Swedes

the Fins

and the islands of Novaya Zemlya

Wrapping over Asia’s upper coast

the country grated against several

existing territories

in a months-long process of slow growth

before cartographers

eventually found her

eastern border, nestled

against the far Pacific coast

Vast coastal nation of ice and snow

Norway being cold

and split through with fjords

veins and forest deeps

but also menthol

and the clean pragmatism of public

transportation

She could call herself a sterile kingdom

were it not for the small strand of earth

at the distant edge of Kamchatka

There the land is temperate

and covered in a bright lichen

that grows out from the shoreline

in huge-reaching tendrils

into the sea

The moss is sacred

and subspecies range from blue-gray

to vermillion in color ––

the livid of birch smoke roiling up

and fire

from the witch’s pyre