Pyrocene

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by Shantell Powell

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When I was little, I inhaled deeply while Daddy
filled the tank at the Esso,
me, a three-year-old huffing leaded gas from the backseat
thinking it smelled as delicious as cake in the oven.

While the Irving corporation sprayed me with DDT,
the future was presented to me
as fancy cakes in a bakery.
Cities displayed on countertop earth
beneath glass domes.
A sterile world designed for humans
taming nature in tidy dioramas.
trees in neat rows
birds in cages
orcas in tanks,
while flying cars frost all with sweet leaded fumes.

My little girl future is now.
Fracking and tar sands and oil spills on oceans
We are the cakes
We are burning in the pyrocene.
Hot house
Heat dome
Fire season
Smoke
changing the light so
my garden glows lurid
preternatural green
beneath poison skies.

Asthmatic hazmatic, I wear masks
outdoors for the smoke,
indoors for the pandemic,
at night for the apnea,
in public for the autism.

Sometimes at night I forget to breathe
And lungs flatline until
Something
flips
the
switch
and my lizard brain
wakes me
makes me

Gasp

like a toddler huffing gasoline.

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