Briars and thorns

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…."