Here, it is the speaker’s emotion that breaks up the utterance. When we are upset, choked up, or crying, this is how the words come out: broken into stuttering pauses. Chrusciel replicates this feeling by writing in dramatically incomplete sentences. Writing the same words in one complete sentence would not have come close to conveying the speaker’s longing for home, emotive memories, and flickering insights on her native faith. The poem continues with three unpunctuated sentences which dissolve into loose lines and white space, ending with another dramatically incomplete sentence:

The closing poem in each of the “Eras,” or sections, of the book, all begin as prose poems and dissolve in just the same way the above poem does. This begins to happen several pages from the end of the last Era, leaving the very last poem to be the book-end that matches the opening poem in the book.

The poems in the last Era begin to illustrate the same dissolution of language on a smaller scale. Not only do full words break away from each other in poems, but so, too, do syllables themselves start breaking apart. In “Dear Hoopoe,” the speaker tells:

It is not clear whether the speaker intended to spill the syllables or not, but either way, the spilling of syllables is an unavoidable part of the linguistic patriation/repatriation process, the movement of continual accretion and loss. Six pages later, the thread is picked up again in the poem titled

The speaker repeats, “We walk on a frozen lake and spill the syllables into dusk. The purgatory souls inhabit us. We are their morphemes.” She is living in limbo, inhabiting the in-between state of purgatory in which her bilingual status places her, now broken down into mere morphemes: linguistic building blocks so small, they can almost be used to build utterances in either language. The poem closes with a rumination on the consequent ontological status of syllables:

These poems collectively break the strata apart: with the lungs of a poet and the eyes of a geologist, the speaker finds that the linguistic layering doesn’t neatly break apart into the original languages that joined to form the whole. They crumble away word by word, syllable by syllable, morpheme by morpheme: now that the writing of this bilingual poet has been stratified by two different languages, there is no going back to her native tongue — and no leaving it behind.