By Preston Smith
Consider the end of the world.
We’ll drink coffee in the courtyard
spit out loose grounds onto the dirt around us
simmer in our sins as the sun turns red.
They’ll tell us to bunker in the basement
as if this were a tornado. I leave the sink to overflow
before pouring our coffee, tell him the earth
won’t save us again—relax for the first time.
I won’t bother to look at how it’s ending.
I’ve felt bombs burst in my body every day
that I almost got caught with him, my personal
climate change in adaptation to his.
We were always the aliens, so we don’t fear
those either. Whatever has come has come
and whatever will be will be—divined.
The sun will still shine without us.
Someday we’ll talk about the color yellow
the poppy fields we would sneak away to
the bedroom we painted in our first house
how, in the end, he still takes his coffee black.
Author:
Preston Smith (he/him) is an MA candidate and poetry editor, and his debut chapbook Red Rover, Red Lover released in early 2020. He can be found on Twitter @psm_writes and Instagram @psm_writes. His poems appear in Black Bough Poetry, Nightingale & Sparrow, and Pink Plastic House, among others.
This piece is a part of DISTANCED 2.0.
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