Anthropocene Aubade
with line borrowed from Amazon box packaging
Morning again & again the weeping angle of the light threatens to level me. I lie here, scan
the ceiling, calibrating in the graying.
The day new & what’s survived? My phone
is the first thing I touch; only the faintest recognition in my scroll & double tap. Every image: light:
starlings, selfies, sinkholes . . . grief like muscle memory—time-accordioned,
infinite, attentive (like God, though I aphase
hallow & hollow far too much, & lately
only absence catches.) The crows, the garbage trucks, the day’s electric hum begun. Another day awake, alive
& what more would it take to make me love this world, box doubled as last-minute diorama?
I mean, love it like an amnesiac; love even its sorrow-widening light.
Ecopoem with Comparatives
after Catherine Wing’s “The Darker Sooner”
& then the winter rivered harder, higher, while we called the darkening weather, watched the water— waded through its tides of dread; dreamed dimmer, duller. We creatured faster, fevered in the anti-quietude; plucked the feathered remnants of our birds of dazzle. Wonder-drowned,
we faded further, ashed our days to afters.
Admit it— we endeared disaster, dared it closer, closer everywhere, we kept our nearer angels wasting brighter, louder.
Violeta Garcia-Mendoza is a Spanish-American poet, writer, and photographer. She is a member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net, and has won a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant. Violeta lives with her family in western Pennsylvania.