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“Outside, the air of apocalypse is all around as I walk beneath millions of satellites.”
—Jackie Wang, The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void
“The 60 generations of historical time—We are an old race: that is, there have been a lot of us.”
—George Oppen, daybook
we are arranged in post to love one another through the grid
we believe we could be so lucky
we crib the meme
which cribs the world
but ours a loss of aura, though the late-night screen glows
though it casts us in sleepless blue and what to do but take the suggestion, concierge
the cooking shows with their odd ingredients, the warring wives, the golden-era gloomy credits
all refraction bounding into the sharp corners of our bedrooms
our pupils, widened, flicker
when on the television the shipping containers filled with sneakers tumble from the deck
they spill their little imprints in the direction of the current
when a body washes up, any decent mathematician
can trace the ocean to the splash
—reel in the bob, the whitecap, the constant riffle circle pushing the mass around
we poke the swollen tongue
these failed mouths
no magic in a shoe swept up on shore
no message looping through the eyelets
motes in the sunny front half—dust, caffeine
the lingering collective glass-frame trauma waiting to flash
I tell the barista I’m anxious and he says, look around
we’re all of us inside kids
my sister watches YouTube at double speed, the chipmunk pundits recapping Rittenhouse
when we are bored we fog up the glass and write to each other flirty, threatening notes
language etches, we know
even structures speak, as there, in the canyon, The Book of Worms
those swollen tubes, those burrows flooded with sediment
we too, tubes, too open to flooding
those microplastics we have in our blood to prove it
and the future tourists who will walk someday all over our faces—
sorry, trace fossils, their soles a perfect and unknowable polymer
in the rainforest we learned to look for the scarlet bellies of low plants, the green filtered out
by the canopy, the epiphytes
they make do with what strikes the earth and bounces back
when Google eventually rendered the world, we spun the globe to our homes
zoomed in as far as the slider allowed, blue-gray shingles
the trees and their crown shyness
a gull caught twice in the camera’s blink, flight-breaking glitch
two halves now too far
shock, a gulf
that we are territorial
that we build our homes just out of view of the neighbor
that when the ailing cottonwood drops a branch on our home—
a skylight
like having removed our black glasses to eye the umbra
we know we know a thing, an accomplishment
there is an image and we have seen it
tendrils which strained to reach us, blinked so easily away
this common ground
on its axis, the earth tilts mere smidges, but we account for this
because of course we do
and at night those metal bodies beam back
scar up the sky until it curls around us like a stubborn, January leaf
Rachel Franklin Wood grew up in Laramie, Wyoming. Currently, she lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Annulet, Fence, Hayden's Ferry Review, and We Want It All: An Anthology of Trans Poetics.
