Fire
Flood
The bird-killing blades of a California wind farm
The orange crush surf of a Florida election denier’s coiffure
Uncle Sam under indictment
El Niño out of sorts
Our brown belt maestros
summer’s bomber bumblebees
get chilled in coolers
to yield
bug mug shots & raw data tallies
Yes, my homeland’s an island of
Europa in America
Yes, my religion traces its spores
back to the truffled catacombs
of the Vatican
As privileged descendants
of the conquering colonialists
we make easy acknowledgements
only to wait in awkward silences
for forgiveness
shamed
by the sins & omissions
of our ancestors
Things having gotten so
complicated & convoluted
we brainy band of scheming apes
have had to invent tools
to match the mountains of our times
Electronics. Relativity. ChatGPT
Technologies just to keep us
barely on top of it
or itki
as Robin Wall Kimmerer might say
This carcinogenic bio-dynamic
dark sky
of our expanding human
smear
A quantum heap of science’s
dark matter
lurking just behind the visible sphere
of a neighbor’s night scope
Yet
ravens continue to fly
low overhead in Cochise’s Stronghold
protesting loudly
at the trickster world
unraveling like barbed wire
beneath them
& the Colorado River flannelmouth
still spawn
looking up in awe
at the Grand Canyon’s meteoritic
heavens
soaring above them
