how many times can you live through the apocalypse?
when you were little there was this beach that was free to go to. you didn't really like it on account of the litter. at one point, a white bag caught around your ankle, and for a moment (fish child), you panicked about jellyfish. on the foam, the red-pink words read thank you, stacked on top of each other, tangled in the kelp.
they have a new program (three thousand american dollars) to send your dead relative to the moon. there is a lot of evidence that our local orbit is becoming ever-more dangerously populated with "micro" satellites - debris in a round miasma becoming a thick web above us. maybe angels cannot hear us through the pollution.
you used to picture deep space like a thick membrane, or a blanket. someone said to you once the universe has no edge and that fucked with you for a long time, trying to picture what shape infinity has. your coworker is writing a short story about ecological collapse, which she is submitting for a little side-money so she can survive the current economical collapse.
the birds haven't gone to sleep this winter. that is probably bad. something that actually freaks you out is the natural temperature of human bodies versus the survival temperature of certain fungi. there is a podcast called s-town, in which a man kills himself over climate anxiety. he was probably meant to seem sort of unhinged. it just seems like it is becoming increasingly clear he was being honest.
space is not empty, we have put our dead into the stars. at some point they will figure out how to put ads into our sleep. you need to pay for the greenlife subscription service to be able to save the world.
there is a lot of ways this poem ends. but you have been wearing the same jeans and shirts since you were, like, 18. it is a hard life, sometimes, watching the entire foundation crack. there was this one moment over the summer, where you were shaking with heat exhaustion and dehydration. you were offered a nestle water bottle.
for three thousand dollars, you can send your ashes into space.
instead, you wash out the peanut butter jar. you put the avocado-toothpick spiked seed ball into water (even though they never grow very far). you borrow what you do not want to buy. you pick up any litter you find. you do not have a lot of control, really. but where you do - if there is one thing you can do, you do it.
something about that. you need to believe that must be true for the rest of humanity. or maybe - you need to believe that to be true, or else there will not be a rest of humanity.
Happy New Year!
Here's a rabbit to start off 2023.
'We said our goodbyes
And blew the stars out
Like candles'
- ellen everett
Redraw of an old drawing i did a while back :)
This is it. This is my post that brings me so close to the rest of humanity I instinctively try to breathe shallowly.
quick what is everyone doing right now
@the-crow-goddix-abode
You told me you saw bats at sunset today and I confessed I'd never seen bats before and now I'm going to spend the hottest months of the year in a city in a country I've never visited before because I want you to show me.
When your literal existance makes ME wanna think and want to explore more places in the world. Nerd.
I'm an intern and my job is to enter addresses from hand-written letters into the database and did you know that Joshua Neumann from Hermannstreet 4, Cologne, has a life too
Oh
He's a principal in a small town. I googled it.
A mid-50s couple donated 100 dollars to our cause and I said that's very generous of you and he shrugged and said is it really
Oh
I guess it isn't really. Not for us.
When I came back after New Year the woman I've been working a lot with saw me in the office kitchen and hugged me.
I googled a scrawled address to decipher it and the town was so pretty I'm going to go there on a day trip with some friends. By train. Like we did 2 years ago.
You know what I'm saying, you know it.
you can pry starting sentences with 'and' or 'but' out of my cold, dead hands
“X celebrity is the most beautiful woman in the world etc etc.” Uh no it’s my mom and also a random girl i saw while i was at work once
it is november, and yesterday it felt like it was supposed to be snowing. in boston, november used a winter month, not a fall month. it is supposed to be chilly; rarely capping over 45F. it is a sweater-and-jacket month. it is a "maybe a scarf too" month. in my childhood, november meant blizzards and sleet.
it did not snow. tomorrow the weather predicts a high of 76.
i have spent so many years of my life studying the longterm possibilities of climate change - the culmination of capitalism wreaking havoc on the bodies of people, animals, plants - but every so often i am still shocked by something small and personal.
in a hundred years, when someone goes outside in boston - will they know the feeling of "snow in the air"?
i know it's a learned feeling, a sensation that maybe only longterm experience can teach. a few years ago, i was walking with my friend who had just moved up from the south. i said it smells like snow and she gave me this look like - what the fuck. i said it feels like snow too, which didn't help. she looked up to the bright blue sky and then back at me and then back at the sky. 12 hours later, we had 3 inches. you can just tell if it's going to snow.
except i can't tell, anymore. i stand outside in a tee shirt and watch my dog dance around a lake. we're in a drought and the skin of the water has peeled back twenty meters. the lake is tamed, quiet, puddlelike and sour. my pokemon go app warns there's a weather condition in my area.
my dog gets too hot from running and sits in the water and i want to laugh about his long frame and how awkwardly he sits - and i can't. some simian part of my brain is scratching the walls. it was supposed to snow. it was supposed to snow, but now it's warm instead.
during the last full solar eclipse, the dogs and the birds and the crickets went crazy under utter darkness. we laughed at them then, promising it will all be okay in a moment. but some part of me is still locked in that long night: some animal sensation.
something is wrong, my body says. i can't afford eggs or rent. i go outside to watch a sunset and listen to birdsong. i don't bring a jacket. allergies are killing me this season, allergies i didn't have as a kid. everyone comments that halloween has started to feel strange, offkilter. that it's hard having "holiday cheer." my body thinks it's april, and then it thinks we're in september, and then june.
something is terribly wrong, she whispers. go outside. it is supposed to be snowing.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), poem 85 from “The Gardener”, 1914 Translated by the author from the original Bengali. New York: The Macmillan Company.
A Blacksmith’s Dream
ordered pizza from a small local place and they didnt actually cut it so i've chosen to revert to a wild animal and begin ripping it apart instead of just using a knife to portion slices
(She/her) Hullo! I post poetry. Sometimes. sometimes I just break bottles and suddenly there are letters @antagonistic-sunsetgirl for non-poetry
413 posts