for elizabeth, at the start of the end of the world by ethan s. evans

20% of the atlantic's plankton dissolving as i lay my hand across your shoulder.

for elizabeth, at the start of the end of the world

by ethan s. evans

---

money fled the neighborhood
like a swallowtail let out of a bear trap. 
as we walked under the bridge 
two river logs startled an arrow 
of crows into traffic. new heat
hung over the county like a skin
on raw milk. always hard to analogize
a vanishing future— a precocious child
becoming a cartoon ghost, 20% of 
the atlantic's plankton dissolving 
as i lay my hand across your shoulder.

there is no interesting way to write
that, 50 years ago, a handful 
of company executives decided 
to suppress research that suggested 
fossil fuel extraction might end civilization, 
so i write the rim of the sunset darkened 
above us like a cloud of passenger pigeons 
above the lethe as a stray paws 
for the field mice that live under my porch. 

you said i can't tell if what's missing 
is what’s lost or the idea of it 
having been here. we both imagined
the apartment blocks on either side of us 
collapsing into the hum of imported insects. 
a snowy egret's plume lifted over the bosk, 
hemmed at city's edge by the highway, 
as a beaver sideled through 
tangled reed and mallow. the stream 
made a bend in the crook of your elbow, 
phosphates in a sheen over smoothed shale, 
none of us growing old.