Lola and the Apocalypse

She sees catastrophe in every crow,
          in every knocked-down clothesline—mostly

volcanoes and floods but sometimes scourges,
          blue tongues, waves that forget their place

and storm into cities. Her mind stops at flesh peeling
          back from the bone until it's white as milk,

the kind that makes grown men grow breasts,
          and they feel that this is a catastrophe, but it's not.

Once when men were automobiles, the roads were slick
          with sweat. They gleamed. Days were lost

to spectatorship, making bets on which color would rise up
          out of the dark. Our girl made twenty dollars

on violet, but someone stole it. Who knows who?
          It was hard to tell one chrome from another.

You couldn't cross for fear of getting hit, a parade
          of reds and browns. And maybe the afterlife is a bookshop,

and she's been good, so she'll get to loiter
          by Pop Culture/Crime instead of Business/Money.

From her perch, she'll count personality types. The schizotypals
          will never object when she fondles their frontal lobes,

that gray, dirty satin. Elbow-deep in it. Her epigraph will remain
          unwritten because there's no one left to scrawl platitudes:

For every pain, there is a duck with your name on it.
          But there aren't any ducks. At ponds worldwide, they ate

each other when no guests tossed crumbs and shooed away
          the geese that strike as if their bodies are lit fuses.

When cities were coal mines, the children played
          color games, too, but it was hard to determine a winner.

Lola knew a man there who didn't balk at anything, could stare down
          whatever slime-bellied beast approached their home.

She can't recall his name, but it could have been Roger.
          They had books, too, mostly Cultural Studies.

"Maybe I'm not alone," she thinks. "Maybe the devil stalks me
          right this minute, wants me to run, make it more exciting."

Lola sits down on the nearest ledge. "Ha," she thinks. "Haha."
          She doesn't notice the fissure at first. It sneaks

between floorboards, and when she pries them apart,
          her fingertips bleed in protest. They drip

onto the bleach-white worms that catch fire in the light.
          And then the floor collapses and then the world.

The survivors are called hostages or will be
          if any are met. Hostages in pines, hostages in barns,

hostages in the great wide open
          that makes them feel slit, wrist to armpit, in littleness.




From All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned (Black Lawrence Press, 2017). All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the author.