— with recycled line from Juliana Spahr

In the dark we ignore the radio, eat breakfast
— a bowl of black beans mixed with pinto. The voice trembles
as it reports the news.

The last mourning dove in North America — whose species disappeared
one by one
— is dead.

The end people imagined is not the end we are experiencing.
Rather, the end is like putting a child to sleep
— both quiet & intentional.

We stare at each other
in these unremarkable moments at the end of our lives with nothing more to say
except we had a good run.

After the fourth lockdown this year we hopped
over a busted up picket fence & walked
into a crowd of rotting maple trees out back, underneath which we buried

papers, photographs printed at Walgreens, a list of names
for the baby we terminated
before the hospital shuttered.

“This world was a luminous archive of things,”
she says to me,
“& we’ve destroyed most of them.”

In the distance a buck
we named August lifts its head
from the polluted creek that we too are forced to drink from.

With nothing more to say, we stare
at each other during this final lap — I can’t help but imagine
even it knows what’s coming.