Originally published in Allium, A Journal of Poetry & Prose. Fall 2024.
The planet gets hotter and the flowers get more sun
They get bigger and bigger
Breathing out
The air is rich in oxygen
Our lungs grow smaller
Our noses grow smaller
Everyone is beautiful and healthy
We lay under the enormous flowers under the hot sun
They give us shade
But still our skin hardens to protect us
We swim in the risen seas
Everywhere is tropical
We grow shimmery scales and reflect the sun
Our eyelashes get long
Night is short
We lose the rods in our eyes
And grow new cones
We see millions of new colors
We see radio waves and microwaves
Everything is loud and vibrant and wavy
We can see the flowers for what they really are
The flowers glow so huge and bright
We barely sleep
We all forget what it’s like to dream
We become wistful under the shadows of the monstrous petals
Trees get so tall they are falling
We build bridges with their trunks from island to island
Soon we are having children with whales
We have tapped into a greater universal consciousness
We feel the pain of the earth in our tiny water lungs
Like hunger but deeper and sadder
We grow new organs to sense conceptual gravity
It’s mud everywhere it’s not the ocean
We make rafts
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