Late Anthropocene Love Poem With Window Clings

by Violeta Garcia-Mendoza

In this version of the end, plastic snowflakes
fill our hands. We peel and stick, attempt
distraction in accelerant disaster.

In brief, bright light, we tesselate, veil shadows
delicate as lace over each other;
makeshift warmth enough, lattice our breaths.

Soft focus and the sequence shimmers: cell
mitosis slides mid-slow dance, microscope.

In other centuries, we’d liken it
to other fractals: the sun’s spread through
stained glass, geode, kaleidoscope.

Once you said love isn’t the cathedral
but the building of… which is to say the world
has only ever vowed to end. Let’s not

devote ourselves to devastation.
Whatever happens, let them find our nested bones—

love coraled like electric current etched
through glass, spark trapped between pressed planes
of ice, extinct in dazzle.

::

Violeta Garcia-Mendoza is a Spanish-American poet, writer, and photographer. She is a member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops and a reader for Split Rock Review/Press. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and awarded a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant. Violeta lives with her family in western Pennsylvania.

Photo by Semyon Borisov