God of Flame, of Wick; God of Whatever Breaks Us Quickest —
I confess to dreaming of The End. How not to? The shuttered
shacks, the horror ads. Confess, too, to making lists of who to save
and leave behind. This is not a flattering admission. I confess

I have studied the jellyfish — how they swallow themselves:
lips transformed to limbs, eyes to teeth, whole genomes
re-transcribed; and the small man parsing iotas in a Petri Dish,
his loving tweezers feeding each amoebic mouth —

beneath I-Beam and overpass, in culverts and cul-de-sacs,
our small forevers march on. Amaranth and milkweed, coiled
as children playing at the foundry, its smokestack mushrooms
thick enough to blot the sun — and inside, men forged

on iron, on anvil — this is what we cling to. Just this.