Artifact
We are the ancients that people will wonder about in a thousand years.
Lying naked in bed, eating grapes
with a cat in the corner.
A mosaic that overlays the underbelly of this settler-colony in decay.
We witness the Republic fall, and I pray empire does not live on.
2025 C.E. experiences Black Plague, the Crusades, and World War III at the same time, and more.
I come from the land of blood and guns.
I come from the land of advertisement and renter’s insurance.
I come from the land of road kill and beggar’s trails.
Desecration everywhere.
Lead in the water, God knows what in the food.
Road signs that read, “do not feed the homeless,”
but, “cash for Diabetic strips!"
Crumbs of bottle caps and bullet shells that lead to the corner store!
I don’t come from the land, I come from a wastescape on top of lands, stolen.
I inherit a state of genocide and slavery that will salt the fields of history and burden the forests of culture for generations.
The digital age is going dark, and we have forgotten the use of fire.
I shall write this letter on a wind-blown piece of plastic, using a pungent Sharpie,
so futures know the story not etched into stone by our overlords.
Mermaids
I
Lately, happiness has been hitting like flashbacks.
Like, the air takes me to the southeast coast ocean,
but the sun is so california.
Those bushes are the same ones outside my house,
and this road rash looks just like that one time on Virginia Hills,
despite colloquial gravel.
Running around in a field is so elementary.
And free!
II
I’m with my friends on a family vacation to my grandmother’s.
I’m still bathing in the warmth of a car ride even though I’m the one driving.
Music has attachments that allow me to travel through place-time.
I’m dancing on a dock, and now a deck, a country apart,
like they’re cut from the same tree.
All in the room I haven’t left.
The one I believe to be in too long
III
because lately, happiness has been hitting like flashbacks.
And I want the mermaids to swim all this way from Norfolk
to sweep me off the mountaintop I’m stuck on.
I’m feeling myself everywhere but where I’m at,
and does that mean to head on or go back?
I thought maturity was supposed to make sense.
I’m more convoluted than ever.
Pinpointing trauma shouldn’t be the way to remember life.
IV
I want it to be happiness,
like I want now to one day be a nice flashback,
but that’s not happening and I fear the joy in this era will be forgotten in pain.
Because I can relate today to that, and that’s why I look back,
like I want my future to be like the past,
so reminiscing is active.
So today has to be what I can look back to because later on,
what if I run out of ... to remember?