by Ottavia Paluch
after Steven Espada Dawson
is that they’re all dead.
Whenever I look up
the first thing I notice
is the pain shooting
from my trapezius
instead of from the sky.
It takes me a million years
to do the simplest things—
right now, I am burning
a bright, beautiful body within
my own flesh. This is complicated:
it’ll be done within the hour.
I keep forgetting that the end
of the world is so many light years
away. The body within me
is red, gigantic, looks nothing
like me. I am birthing
the apocalypse. Singing twinkle,
twinkle, little star to the apocalypse,
knowing exactly what it is, and yet
still wondering what I am,
what we both are becoming.
Ottavia Paluch lives in Ontario, Canada. Her work is published or forthcoming in Four Way Review, Gigantic Sequins, Kissing Dynamite, Ghost City Review, and Alexandria Quarterly, among other places.
Emerge Literary Journal 