Poetry by Amy Asmussen
I.
a glass eye won’t halt a tree’s death,
a consummation of flame and flesh,
children trade pennies for posters
and skip school to lead
The March to Save the Planet,
but there isn’t a light on in the house, in the
skull of a Mouse, except for a burner
on the stove, and the
park she loves to sit in,
no shoes, rooted, reptilian —
they’re turning it into 7-Eleven.
II.
raindrops on the plastic slide in
a playground of the mind.
oranges, sliced and arranged
in spiral patterns on the edge of a tea plate.
Algernon’s armadillo curls up inside the alabaster
walls of the house on Lemon Street
and waits for the wind to abate, while
a boy paints the names and forms
of an extinction: Thylacine and Quagga
and California Condor, on the flank of the 7-Eleven.
the armadillo watches from a hole in the drywall
until the police arrive, to arrest him.
III.
inside, the store clerk stamps an ampersand
across the sky and prays for rain.
the woman on the streetcorner, the one with a tongue split
like a snake’s, plots the end of the world on a silver spool
addled, according to Soil Scientists, by microplastics —
she tells stories of dead astronauts, unspooling silverthreads,
stitching bones and sinews together
IV.
I tossed McDonald’s wrappers and a mummified mermaid’s purse
onto the highway, licked the asphalt
and relished the grit on tongue and tastebud.
I drew the sun into myself, wishing to grow like a kelp forest,
tall and undisturbed, closer to the sun’s red mouth.
Wildfire Season arrived in May
this year, and soon we’ll have
Wildfire Years.
V.
stand at the edge of the pier,
look down and watch a crab scuttle up the dock posts,
the lifelegs, covered in mollusks,
artillery in the intertidal zone: the frontlines
of the apocalypse.
wish for an exoskeleton, a dark crevice,
follow the edged backs of mutated rats
into deadends and wish, this time, for a small
guiltless existence (rodentia).
VI.
touched soil and wept
the game of trades:
a dying desecrated good green Mother
and the last of us: a menagerie of
computer chips and billions of tons of plastic.
(weep)
why do I feel such dread in the morningtime?
when everything is lilac
and everything is heavy,
take to the sea.
the World’s Richest Man balances his knifepoint on the anthropocene,
alone in his shithouse on Mars.
