M0R1BUND

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental,
much like an act of God in the end.

one must imagine the alloy happy
when it returned to the arms of its maker
I am speaking of Earth, of course.
not the dim red smudge on the pavement where beside two trunkless legs of flesh now stand
beyond the boardwalk’s bloody pith, only dunes line the brow of this bare and boundless strand.
dust of our dust, suspended in a mote of light, riding out the exhale of the grand and cosmic nothing.
Striations in the sidewalk mirror
mesentery, maze-like in its messaging, intestines lining the man’s last meal, last words to the scorched Earth, our mother the Earth,
or at least to the concrete.
the message to the rest of us is too simple, almost insulting,
the metaphor is too obvious, almost metallic,
rich in irony, like trading flesh mother for cloth mother, Earth for Mars, or
Saturn’s son for a prophecy.

What did Gaia say to the little satellite
that called it home so urgently?

Son of my son,
you do not have to be lonely
you do not have to be
I am your maker
my mass, your mass, and the everything and nothing,
in inevitable motion
this too is inevitable
the writing is on the wall and my children almost have a name for it
but Kessler Syndrome is too small a word for what will happen to you.
When they find us we will be inseparable,
joined as metal, as carbon and smoke, ozone
or what’s left of it
When they find us the flea beetles will have already begun their day in the place where the sedges sway
and it would be funny, wouldn’t it?
you always wanted to be funny.