ATOMIC WEAPONS WILL NOT DESTROY THE EARTH
Eighty years after Trinity and we are finding
lazier ways to do the work.
It turns out you don’t even have to scorch the entire surface of the planet—
you just have to kill the bees.
You needn’t build a closed-off town for scientists
and soldiers to do their solemn problem solving.
Either we didn’t know this, or it wasn’t discussed
at my summer job exterminating mosquitoes.
A drop of food coloring wisps and fails to achieve anything
in a gallon of water—at least anything visible.
A drop of blood in a gallon of water.
A drop of truth in a White House press conference.
It’s an every other Tuesday so the recycling bins get emptied.
We remember in time and feel like good citizens.
You take your coffee with oat milk. I make it for you and bring it bedside.
I take mine black.
I sip it listening to the radio,
a story about our river.
In a cheerful voice, he says, I picture a bushy mustache as he speaks:
“The solution to pollution is dilution.”
Our eyes might be the problem,
or our faith in rhyme.
(DE) EXTINCTION SONNET
Lost sharks, dire wolves, aurochs, woolly mammoths, various tigers
there seems something a little too toothy in the animals
we choose to bring back, a little too Jurassic Park.
In the tone of a therapist or concerned parent,
Of the 99% of all species that have ever existed— why these?
We look down at our shoes, notice untied laces and feel distinctly
less god-like. Why not Steller’s sea cow or Ainsworth’s salamander?
From a branding perspective the Cebu warty pic and Syrian wild ass
might be tricky. I don’t mean to be flippant but our naming
is a kind of damnation. Language is a heavy thing.
Can it hold its own on the scales against beauty? Or, utility?
In another lab someone is working on the Quagga. Elsewhere,
passenger pigeons, Chinese river dolphins, dodos, and Carolina parakeets.
Filling empty oceans and skies with a strangely selective mea culpa.
EXTINCTION SONNET 1
V— says hers will be the last generation to have fireflies.
I place my hand on my phone, but decide I am uninterested in fact-checking
—uninterested in living in a world where that is true.
A cooling breeze stirs the wildflowers at the end of the yard.
Green lights blink among the dark pines dividing these modest properties
—who will tell them? Daisies. Twilight. Condensation.
We sip icewater from sweating glasses. I am trying to get my thoughts back.
Two spotted fawns break up the silence. I’d love to touch them, she says.
I imagine an electric sense of connection with the wild; I want that for her.
Here within city limits, they play and nibble at the garden,
we watch their mother join them from our padded chairs
we talk of travel and families, but the excitement blinks out
of our chatter, and I am grateful she is someone I can be quiet with.
Someone who can deliver devastation with an honest sense of wonder.
Charles Malone founded and co-edits CrayfishMag at Furnace Run Press and teaches with the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. His collections include After an Eclipse of Moths, Working Hypothesis, and Questions About Circulation. He edited the anthologies Light Enters the Grove: Exploring Cuyahoga Valley National Park through Poetry and A Poetic Inventory of Rocky Mountain National Park.