Olive, the olive Ridley sea turtle,
lost nine hundred ninety nine
brothers and sisters and cousins
to raccoons and foxes and gulls,
shrimp nets and poachers
and plastic grocery bags.
Now she's back on the beach
carving a nest of her own
for the first time.
The carpenter ant carries a speck
of a Snickers that fell from the mouth
of little Bobby onto the sidewalk.
She hurries to carry it back to the colony
under the wood pile in the shed,
but her prize is surprised by
a marauding scout of the species
we deign to name: thief ant. Because of
their fondness for grease and theft.
Fatima had just finished her ablutions,
She was ready for evening prayers
when the barrel bomb exploded.
That same morning Farley, the serial
wife abuser, climbed off his Harley
and purchased a winning lottery ticket
at the AM/PM minimart in
Doublecross, West Virginia.
The prize was big enough
to buy two point three million
cases of Bud. He ran over a squirrel
on his way back home and grinned.
NASA detected an asteroid
the size of Manhattan that night,
headed towards Earth, but decided it best
to conceal it as it would only
cause panic. The president declined
to believe the warning and played his regular
Saturday afternoon eighteen holes.
He was just tucking in to his postgame steak
when the asteroid hit ten miles southwest of Benghazi.
The atmosphere ignited and the planet
was enveloped in smoke and dust for years.
Everyone eventually starved,
when the remaining survivors
finished off the last cans of Spam
and creamed corn.
Ten thousand years later,
a butterfly fluttered across
what had once been
Pennsylvania Avenue and perched
on the white marble rubble of the mansion
now weathered by a hundred centuries
of storms to soft hillocks covered in vines,
all the glass in the world reverted to sand.
The monuments were as if sculpted in melted candle wax.
One last remnant of text protrudes,
caught under a stone, echoes the flap
of her wings …
"I will make it a wasteland,
neither pruned nor cultivated,
and briers and thorns will grow there…."
