poem
Volume 25, Number 2

The Recombinant Future

Though the planet would be nothing we caused, disruption of the climate is another story.

And, still, placing blame elsewhere demands its right to heat the air.

Scarlet fractions make one incomplete. The ancestral brain mentors the mind, but fosters a bit of misunderstanding. The oceans dissolve even the time you experienced birth-canal guilt.

So the red-rock mother turns dark behind everyone. Moth-dust histories of matter thicken and thin. Massive amounts of emergency water arrive from the poles in warming air that pours, in body taking it to right and left brains, where the next century’s past grows dark-brown eyes.

Inexplicable strains accrue. Boilerplate inception, amplifying hunger, a foot on the accelerator, overtakes efficiency. In the curl and peel, the cull and back-lit fabric, the orchestra cradles its insistent incompleteness.

As frequencies stump identity, as woe besets wild animals, as Roman numerals burn as torches, the collective crashes at the long end of sustenance.


—James Grabill