Unseasonable
Food for the Worms
Climate Animals
Feral
Threshold
Everything Rots
New York City is Now Subtropical - The New York Times
Taro & canna are flourishing,
& the orchids are getting sultry.
But for all this beauty of the tropics,
the native plants were sacrificed.
February's fever dream, a delusion
luring buds to bloom out of season.
O daffodil, stay safe under the soil.
O tulip, please, it isn't your time!
O heliotrope, O hyacinth, O hellebore,
slip back into sheltered slumber.
O lilac tree, don't scent fair, fickle air
with fragile fragrance, don't wither
tender splendor in a hostile clime.
Hunker down & reject this premature
plague of spring. Soon we'll be forced
to tell our children the fairytale of
four seasons. How once we watched
leaves color & fall to conjure snow,
melting to become gentle rain for the
flowers we used to know. How brief &
kind summer's heat was on our skin.
Now we blister & sweat. Now the rain
steams above the boiling pot of earth.
Under cruelty's microscope, truth refracts,
a kaleidoscope of detritus.
Try on your enemy's skin to see if empathy kills ego.
We can't keep doing this.
The doorbell rings, but no one answers.
Only strangers & specters visit uninvited.
Burn the night orchard. Diamond your arbor.
Arteries bleed chlorophyll when you sleep.
A dark thicket shadowing your finery.
The sparrows sing beware.
Hell is a breath trapped in a coffin.
Leaves are most beautiful just before they die.
Full color life always falls.
On my knees, I pray oxygen into my lungs.
You say you know how close the moon is, but
when did you ever orbit?
Everyone forget the worms, the fungus,
all the glorious bacteria.
No one wants to think about what
devours death underneath the noise.
Every time the temperature rises, people fall
to all fours, devolving into deranged beasts,
snapping & snarling, scurrying & crawling,
clutching & clawing at drought-parched dirt.
Driving erratic in crash-lure cars, careening wildly,
straddling highway lanes, screaming & shaking
fists of weather-fueled fury. Animals writhing in
the cage of this chaotic, changing climate.
It's not safe to travel or worship or send kids to school,
for every time the heat spikes, every beast grabs a gun,
every rage becomes bullet, every body turns target.
Humanity reduced to mere, mercurial instinct,
primal puppets twisting in the tempest.
So what hope have we of survival?
When all we've done, & will continue
to do, robs the earth of revival.
all the devils are here - William Shakespeare, The Tempest.1.2.215-216.
Under a dome of rusting metal & broken glass, a garden blooms,
monstrous, perfuming the air with the corpse flower stench of
apathy, acceptance of the unacceptable, corruption coddled in
cold arms of calculation. Diademed demagogues drink
an ocean of blood in gemmed goblets, a cabalistic feast.
Gluttonous incompetence & bloodlust as sustenance, a susurrus
swarm of schadenfreude, hisses of pandemonium as perfection.
Hidden behind agitated avatars, we scream injustice, dithering
between exaltation & annihilation. History, I judged you too
harshly. Never learning from ancestral shame, we trace our
fossilized footsteps in ruins of circular reasoning, orbiting
the truth but never landing as the world burns beneath
our obstinate feet. Silencing our better angels with
duct tape & machetes. Dank & maggot-infested self-deception
takes root in the dark, our cherished cellars of deflection.
We have given over the field of moral high ground. For
convenience, for advantage, for a price. Virtue strangled
at conception, mourned in cathedrals of catastrophe.
Still the devils feast.
Embers smolder in silence, a millennium of hindsight.
Buzzards circle the carcass of civility, the remnants of
humility & grace. Human skin is the most effective mask
for feasting beasts. Clocks break while we sleep. We
keep hitting snooze, hoping the alarm is merely music.
Thoughts & prayers can't tame a wayward garden or bring
back the dead, collateral damage of our war of words. So
let's agree to disagree on who has the right to live unmarred
& drink our self-determined doom down to the dregs.
Milkweed succors the monarch,
but the bees buzz belladonna.
Autumnal ghosts glut gutters &
moths rock wicker on the porch.
The bald cypress is undressing for the neighbors again.
She'll shiver till Spring cloaks her arms in green.
Say not what you mean, I see your reflection in
my Janus-faced shards.
You are still the only one who knows my true, twin faces
hidden beneath a mask.
Dirt under my fingernails, I spit coffin nails.
A poisoned well still quenches my thirst.
Your mother calls on the old landline, her voice
muffled & mingled in our thunder.
Your raging storm surge, my bitter excuses.
We once breathed in harmony, a susurrus hum,
but now your eyes glare cacophony.
My palm, a reservoir. Your mouth, a river basin.
Suffer the gravestones in mid-summer.
Wave to me from the torch-bearing mob.
There's a body in the back garden.
Blood, a drum, a thrum in my chest.
I've been afraid of water since the flood.
Driving at night without headlights,
I'm dangerous, desolate, darkness,
sprawling, star-swathed, dimmed.
I was never given love I didn't have to earn.
Even then, it was not a living wage.
A battered heart barely beats. Tattered trust,
chunks of meat scattered on the highway.
There are bones in the back garden,
buried beyond anyone's reach.
V.C. Myers is the author of the forthcoming Ophelia (Femme Salvé Books, 2023) and Give the Bard a Tetanus Shot (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2019). She has edited for Barren Magazine, Ice Floe Press, and Frontier Poetry. Her work appears in ekphrastic exhibits and journals worldwide, including EPOCH, Poet Lore, and Prairie Schooner. An Appalachian poet, she has lived in Ireland, England, and West Virginia. Her website is vcmyers.com.
