The Future: Three Poems by Holly Day

Despite My Reservations Regarding the Apocalypse

the dragon outside my bedroom window tells me
that the end is coming soon, that it’s okay to get drunk
fucked up, fuck around, because it’s all going to come crashing down
so very soon
that there’s no reason to practice prudence or prudishness. it blinks its gigantic
blue-green eyes at me through the crack between the flowered bedroom curtains
so beguilingly I have no choice but to believe it’s true.

later, in the kitchen, the dragon curls up around my tiny dinette
tail delicately tucked around its body and out of the way of my heavy feet
watches me cooking dinner, tells me I should order a pizza instead
because there’s no reason to keep any money in my bank account
or worry about cholesterol or being fat or the evildoings or shady associations
of certain corporate pizza places
when the end of the world is so close
so very close
that the dragon can already taste the smoldering embers of burning cities on its tongue
already knows what I’ll look and smell like when I’m dead.

Baked into the Sand

countless stones stroked by
countless feet, scattered
in this identical precise
configuration for a countless
existence, millennia ripped
under the broad wheels of
an armored truck. sand twists

to glass and blazes crimson
and then black and then lifeless
powder, the fractured leftovers
of antediluvian minaret spires
whose disintegration is so deliberate
and complete, there is nothing left
to uncover or encounter. Satellites

make familiar new fictions:
stories of ancient trade routes
deserted oases still surrounded by the faint
pad-prints of long-dead camels
the pointed toes of unshod horses,
the imprints of sandaled feet.

When the Dust Finally Settles

one day, paleontologists will uncover our dead bodies
gape at our minute brainpans, our
easily broken skeletal construction
speculate on our skillful tool-making capacity
generate ridiculous mythologies
concerning our lost and forgotten civilization.

they’ll fondle our alien carcasses with
suction-cupped tentacles, or claw-tipped footpads
caress the interior recesses of our skulls with feathery antennae
give pretentious and erudite lectures on how we once
fluttered across the skies, flopped along the sand,
or dwelled deep underground.

Holly Day is the author of the poetry collections A Perfect Day for Semaphore (Finishing Line Press), I’m in a Place Where Reason Went Missing (Main Street Rag Publishing Co.), Where We Went Wrong (Clare Songbirds Publishing), and The Yellow Dot of a Daisy (Alien Buddha Press).

Image: imdb.com

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