Calling all trilobites: join us for lunch on The Lunch Thread! Whether you're a scavenger of thought, a filter-feeder of fine phrases, or a hunter of metaphorical meaning, we invite you to scoot your segmented selves over and dig in! Let’s talk about the books you're reading—fossilized favorites or freshly molted finds—the topics you're exploring through poetry and poetics, the panel ideas you dream of surfacing, the things that irk you about the poetry world, and the curious links or tidepools you've discovered lately. Come as you are—calcified, soft-bodied, or newly segmented—and let’s lunch!
During the Paleozoic era, in the pre-genesis of lightless tides, there existed an almost complete marine dominion.
Silicate-laced trilobites emerged as arthropods, bearing precisely segmented exoskeletons and a tripartite form: cephalon, thorax, and pygidium.
They moved through the substrate with symmetrical grace, their armor inscribed—etched in calcite, shaped by pressure and epoch.
Through coordinated locomotion, facilitated by dozens of paired appendages, they traversed the sediment, participating in what might be called the choreography of deep time.
Trace fossils suggest complexity: the ability to burrow, perhaps in response to dimming light, approaching predators, or tension in the water, sensed as something just beyond measurable perception.
Most trilobites followed inherited behavioral scripts.
And yet, one might imagine that a single trilobite deviated—veering gently sideways, encountering a ridge.
No fossil preserves such a moment.
But if it happened, it happened quietly—without disruption or consequence.
The sea receded.
The continents cracked and drifted.
Yet the trilobites remained, or at least their outlines did: still, detailed, mineral-sharp impressions.
Welcome to the Trilobite Forum, where trilopoetics—a poetics of fracture, compression, and trace—serves as our shared mode of attention. Less myth than method, it reads in trilobites not symbols but structures: segmented forms as syntax, extinction as silence. We do not seek origins—we read what remains. Here, language settles like sediment, breaks like shale, and endures not through revelation but through accumulation.
