These are two poems from the more recent project, which
is kind of dealing with the central valley of California,
where I partially grew up as an early site
for the ecological devastation that we're seeing now
across the entire continent.
And the way that this very much formed
like sort of the landscape of my coming of age.
Anthropocene anxiety disorder.
Our whole world is burning.
I am terrified by the mundaneness of it all.
The scent of smoke.
A season of its own.
Sometimes, I mistake the breeze passing through my hair
for the soft approach of flame.
A poem has no allegiance to the truth, and even as I tell it,
I fear you won't believe.
Last summer, paradise burnt.
Every newspaper ran the same photo.
McDonald's golden arches swaddled in flame.
Forgive me.
I was, for a moment, glad to see my stepfather's home vanish.
I did not think of the dead, watched Snapchats
of the freeway medians, their camisoles of smoke
and remembered five summers before,
waking in a fire's path.
The strange calm in our truck's cab.
The campsite flickering orange in the rearview.
Do you think that we'll survive long enough for this
to read as fiction.
There are cameras floating in space turned inward
that will outlive us.
The Arctic smolders in their lenses.
Ah, and I wonder if it's the last monument
man will build large enough for God to note.