A time of squalls and hurricanes.
No dry land but for deserts.
A helluva time.
Earth everywhere
is an unquiet realm.

Let dinosaurs re-inhabit
their abandoned kingdoms
no longer fit for humans.
Give deserts back to jungles,
jungles to seas.

We humans can’t survive on earth
or moon or those peripatetic planets.
Doubtful we deserve it, but
give us a tidy heaven,
a stable staircase there.

SOPPING FOREVER

Nothing dries here by the river.
Clothes snatched off the line sundried
indoors become too damp to wear.

Like the ever-flowing river in my brain…

So too my decades of love-making here
by sun or snow or rain
(sanctioned by gold rings or not).

Even in our pyramid
(our as I won’t be there alone)
merely to remember
             love by the river
                          will make us shiver

till pyramid walls crack open
                      split the lid
                                   and we reconnect our bones
                                                                             and—

but the rest I’ll not confide.

We see the same moon
whole or pre-sliced
like supermarket ham

but too many lights
obscure our familiar
planets and stars.

But we know well to take
whatever whenever however
and pretend to rejoice.

My doctor merely smiled when I
filled in the blank re “alcohol consumption?
How many glasses what & when:”
And surely why.

“One shot glass of cheapo amber rum,
quarter inch in low-fat soymilk, midnight.”

Sliver of moon tonight reveals no rum.
I wander through dark rooms
for what else might bring sleep.
Flies sleep on window screens…

All I find: Gallo sweet vermouth.
Takes too much to mute my thoughts.

As Pushkin wrote a century ago:
“Hordes of black thoughts like black flies…
Hordes of black flies like black thoughts…”

As I navigate the dark I nick a foot
but keep walking on it for a week
Only broke what tardy x-rays show:
a tiny metatarsal near my baby toe...”

So I limp, so still I search for rum…

Elisavietta Ritchie, Broomes Island, Maryland