the world ended in february; it is getting difficult to remember
a time before humanity, ephemeral in the end,
slipped into the gaps between evolution’s gnashing teeth;
i saw the first ghost outside my window
stumbling in the distance from the chapel garden,
walking about the streets with curling fingers,
reaching out to touch warm skin, and i,
behind thick locks and boarded windows,
dared not leave my house for days; in march i sat trembling
as i counted empty jars in my cenotaph pantry;
after eating cat food and the cat i
carried nothing on my back when i fled my home
in search of a safer haven; in april, i stood
on the tops of hollow buildings and looked down at the street
to see faces shining red, ravenous and without mercy in the ash,
i watched a man open up another’s ribcage
like the doors of a hostel, unsealed at the edges
as if just another canned good from a looted grocery store; in may
i caught glimpses of children catatonic in their skin,
orphaned by pestilence and rotting after
their first death and their second, i witnessed
my mother’s apostasy, saw her gnawing on the bones of the vicar
with a king james tattered at her feet; in june i saw my sister
huddled in the corner and clutching a revolver,
white-knuckled, one bullet,
staring down the barrel as wounds bled and hands shook,
and the seed of acedia—germinating in her chest
beside that vile malady—kept her finger twitching just beyond the trigger; i
lamented the absence of the swallowed sun, forgot what apples tasted like,
stopped telling the difference between samaritans and corpses and
observed that which was once called love turn into a hungry fire
as old and primal as leaning stones, carnal and hard and ugly
and spoiled like all else; in july
i noticed my hands had begun to shake every time i heard my name, and i
trudged through another fallen city, broken eyes watching me as i passed
with a shopping cart of tinned pears, the weight of all their hunger tied around my ankles,
marching towards the end beneath a black and starless sky
i felt it, coming closer as i ran,
and crawled, and prayed, and walked. and walked. and walked. and walked. and
in january,
(before i began to fear the human silhouette
and you started holding my hand to keep you sane,)
we drove nowhere on the highway at dusk,
headlights illuminating the obsidian road, moon trailing your truck,
a sacred ghost, omnipresent, neon signs blinking their greetings
for diners and motels and gas station stops, dissonant music laced with static
pouring out your dashboard radio, the two of us
in contented coexistence, wordless,
the world alive and well.
and in february,
in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the terminus began,
the planet shook for a final time and brought to pass
that which is written—o death,
where is thy sting? o grave,
where is thy victory? the dead shall be raised
incorruptible, and us?
we shall be changed

For her eighteenth birthday,
a gift from the fates;
she knows how she will die.
Before, there was a vague notion—
A shadow cast by a hungry dragon
who roosts on the branches of the family tree,
devouring her ancestors, waiting and unslayable.
Now, the diviners speak to her in pedigrees
and punnett squares, leafing through a deck
of tarot cards, checking vials of her blood
for patterns in the tea leaves at the bottom,
hardening the shadows at their edges and
twisting peripheral horror into prophecy,
a promise, and she sees it all,
she sees everything, laid in front of her
and stretching out like a golden string
towards the vanishing horizon:

The sharp burn of dread at every twitch
and missing memory, jellied elegies oozing
from the center of others’ puffed pleasantries,
years spent watching her soul
get thinner and thinner, trapped
within a broken heap of matter and flesh,
cursed bone, misfiring electricity,
eroding endlessly, self destructing,
never ending, ending soon,
and, at last, alone, gazing back on a youth
spent gazing forward, ******, and dying
and derelict, and decades in the making—
she asks herself, what would she not give
for the chance to unknow,
to trade the dragon for the slow, soft lull
of the indifferent stars,
and to die whole and confused,
like the rest of us.

Within the four walls of this library
sit three walls packed into the corner;
shelves, stuffed full of books with dog-eared pages
and slip-disc’d spines and fraying edges,
and a big white sign, which dangles from the ceiling
like a megabat hung on a cave mouth, sleeping and dreaming,
the word “NONFICTION” is inscribed on its countenance,
adjacent to signs shouting “MYSTERY” and “SCIENCE
FICTION” and “FANTASY” and “ROMANCE”
and a thousand other sorts of words
for myth and fabrication. But in this corner
live the rest, the et ceteras, the miscellaneous,
the kingdom of protists; for instance, care for some ethics?
Marx’s manifesto is stacked lazily beside a heap of essays by Rand;
you can practically see the two of them, shaking hands
uneasily, the will to never understand already forming
in their brains, and others yet remain;
Capote and the Clutters share shelf space
with the Mansons, hiding helter skelter behind
gnostic gospels and silent springs and a thousand
dreams for Freud to interpret (translated
from German for your convenience); nearby,
Orwell sings war songs in Catalan, accompanied
by the universe’s most elegant superstrings,
and the caged birds, singing of freedom,
harmonizing a melodious cacophony with the song
of the executioner. Butler criticizes his performance,
and she probably would have anyway, but Friedan thinks
he has a certain sort of mystique and Dawkins offers his own critique,
going on about genes and memes, extinction and delusion, but
not hallucinations—Sacks makes the distinction; let us continue
to praise famous men, and their children after them,
these naked apes, with minds so ***** that
they’re riddled with the emperors of all maladies; oh, Morris
Kinsey and Mukherjee could tell you all about these things,
maybe over lunch with Schlosser or dinner with Pollan,
minglings with Machiavelli over affairs of the state,
or affairs of space and a brief history of time; but,
if you're feeling too full to eat, or to pray, or to love,
ask Frankl what to do, let him change your life
with words from decades yore as he keeps on
his search for meaning just like every man before, at least
that's the case when these boys’ lives weren’t preoccupied
by artful war or bright and shining lies. And here,
by the holy bookend, lies some old and antiquated glossary
which lost most of its “glossy” many years ago,
for one flip through the pages will catalogue the changes
between what we thought we knew about the stars
and our bodies and doomsday as recently
as your last birthday, and all the things that everyone says
we now know that we know; speak,
memory, remember all you can
about this endless, sundry cosmos, and
the microcosms that it boasts; bury my heart,
if not at Wounded Knee, then maybe at this
library, where comprehension and speculation
find themselves in coexistence, packed into a single
point resembling the genesis, and fear and hope
take dueling forms, those of fact and mystery;
and now all that’s left to do is read,
until the end of history.

We attempt rescue, unable to bear
the stardust-coated dragonfly
beat, beat, beating
frantic on the glass.

We entice him to perch
on our extended lifeline-broom
nurse him in a box, where he flutters
quivers, lies quietly blue.

My son cries bitterly
as we place a minute cross
upon the dragonfly grave
while intoning our final goodbyes:

We honor those who have fallen victim
to this fatal architectural trap, lured
by skylights of enticing white-light death
and the paned illusion of freedom.

In admiration of winged determination
and perseverance in the face of futility
we carefully tend the fragile, curved bodies
lay them here to rest under the mock orange.

years of gauze-weighted detritus
swept beneath these ponderous shrubs
a reminder - what seems like freedom
                                                         ­           often isn’t.