Tiny apocalypses everywhere

There never was a we beholden to the imperative to survive
in the Age of Humans. There were only the treasured few, drowning

everyone else for silk & chocolate, oil & pearls. A boutique hell.
So when the news says we have destroyed the future,

I am already mud-buried, thrashing against the claim.
The archive’s silences overflow. Who would want

in this array to be Human? Which is to say, always riding
at the helm with conquistadors, holding feathers for their hats

as tempests of petrol & pesticide rot the womb. As the trees have
been cast into arithmeticity. Among no lovers, only the mill.

Who could survey the manufacture of famine,
separation of children, altar of cages rendered divine

who could watch the disaster carnival spinning
as zero-gravity thrill & say yes, yes, onward, on,

another ticket, please, despite everywhere
blood, everywhere rivers spitting out headstones.

Today the world ends, tomorrow the world ends,
yesterday, & the day before. I am always mud

in this unbearable time of universals wielded
against my beloveds. The Era of Humans,

a stamp on organized abandonment & selective
moralism. The mud of us, a tourist attraction.

As the plantation has always been a tourist attraction. A gift shop
filled with silk & pearl, bodies arranged to the clock & its derivatives.

My beloved is a mountain, my beloved draws me
a map with crayons to find my way home

when the state openly declares a predictable
order for who will be sacrificed

to the belly of the make-shift morgue, & I flee. What we?
My beloveds protest in the streets amid reminders

that planned infection was catastrophe, then & now,
manifest destiny. I am nobody

I am no body I have no body I have no I. Earthwork & storm
electric in the flesh: I am an instant, a flux of reaching.

& this takes me down to the ancient floor
of the water & where the water once was.

I stand in the forest & look up past the canopy
where the pelagic roar before gathered up its fury

of two million years. I am a tree
echoing the feel of regrowth after the burn.

A longleaf pine in succession. An entirety
of forest, invertebrate & mammal, winged

& winded moving past the smolder. New leaf
greening in the quiet beneath the smoke.

An ecology changes, is never broken.
Only looks sparse. Only looks dead.

O deceit of appearances. O certainty, like
we, a long-legged myth.

Reprinted from Wayward Creatures (Host Publications, 2025) with permission.