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Up on a ladder, hammer in hand.
Where are you hiding?
Are you waiting to jump out and surprise me?

Replacing the filter in the portable AC unit, I wonder….
Could the garage fill with carbon monoxide?
Is that how you’re going to find me, asleep?

I slap a mosquito on my leg. But it’s yellow.
Is there a new pandemic brewing? Maybe I’ll be patient zero.
Is that you in the bushes?

A truck encroaches into my lane.
Is this it? Are you guiding the wheel?
Where are you hiding?

The law mower rumbles. Could it explode?
When will death find me?
How long can I hide?

Can I ask you a question?
Would you make me a mention?
When I’m gone
Wouldn’t you feel me at all?

Could you look for me
You know I’m looking to be
Can you hug me again?
Just right before you left.

Have been dark today
I didn’t saw you the whole way,
I was lost with the wind
And you always keeping stepping in my mind.

I heard you today
it wasn’t a good day
but how would you know,
I did not knock at the door.

Keeping real is my thing
I’m boring with all this noise ding.
Make it quiet, they say
they were right in a good way.

Oh! what a night,
How many illusions do i hide in my mind,
But don’t you know something,
I am in a constant change
and i warn you to be careful
cause it’s raining,
and I’m not there
cause I was looking for myself.

It would have been better if the Library burned.

To see it like this
is almost too terrible to stand.

In the color of weak tea gone cold
dust-frosted windowpanes warn you away
from forlorn moaning of rust-frozen hinges
struggling to recognize approaching presence,
distinctions between newcomers and regulars an ever-dimming memory

The hard bone of concrete peers through
heel-worn carpet scrubbed of pigment
uneven sags of wallpaper droop, clenched by faith in powdering glue
their browned waterspots keeping watch over
withered houseplants, spectators to the cruelty of decay
desiccated vestiges

Gone is that entrancing
tea-vapor smell of old books
immersion on entrance:
transition to a warm bath from a rain-chill day
vacuous in absence
suffocating weight: mildew and stagnant air

look away | keep going | remember it as it was.

In the corner, wisp-web temple
the bulky printer fossilizes, strange artifact from
an age without merit
it hears only cadent skittering
discordant mouse-throat renditions of the work song
its squeaky print rollers once sang to
anyone who would listen
above the hushed chatters of discourse
the three old men in the corner, veiled in the weekly paper,
armchair oracles with nowhere to be.

Where is the bubblegum laughter of storytime
ruffle of pages, clacking hen-pecked keyboards,
the heartbeat stamp of due date cards circulating diluted
sums of humanity in and out, clutched like oxygen-clung cells
breathe out—breathe in—breathe out
nourish—return—nourish

Even the most way-set librarians have abandoned
unceremonious posts, leaving questions
echoing unanswered from rafters
Why / Why / Why
Card catalog remnants, huddled together
disheveled, haphazard in rust-sealed bunkers
of jammed drawers can offer no answer

What used to lie between Andromeda and Anemia?

Where shelves once swelled like farmhand muscle
burgeoned by weight of novel thoughts, ancient recitations,
only atrophy lingers, dust the sole
witness to relay movement of tomes succumbed to stillness
a feeble shadow reciting the fading
memory of what it felt like
to be strong

Between slouch-spine volumes, gaps litter shelves
buckshot mosaic
to reach for a book, only for your fingers to trace its absence: monumental loss
it always used to be here
like that last ghost step your foot remembers at the staircase’s end—
you know because the familiar feel of its clothbound
spine in your palm lingers even as
hands close on the jarring pitiless confusion
of hard ground denying your footfall

It would have been better if the Library burned.
Alexandria in all its tragedy still smolders in hearts of those who never
tracked in tide-worn sands, whose fingers
never traced the roughspun papyrus of the larger world
they still damn Caesar in their heart and
pine, mourning for scrolls reduced to ash
particulate memory breathed secondhand

Yet no one remembers that little corner library the next town over
now an eyesore relegated out of focus, victim of renewal
efforts and budget cuts and the inescapable sentence of calendar pages
you glance at it as you pass, muttering some ephemeral eulogy
a real shame that place has been left to rot
but then you’re beyond, yawning roadscape pushing
billboards and LED store signs upon you, flashing colors and limited-time offers crowding
crumbling ballasts out of your mind
after all,

deterioration is nothing to dwell on

Hands engrained with all the wrinkled time,
spent climbing steel and icing bricks together.

They worked with wisdom,
like the aged wine mulled in the garage.

And in the passing years, eventually caved to other endeavors.

Eyes, scanning books with an ease, everything from presidents to disease,
some metaphorical fiction.

Always equipped by wit like a sharp garden tool.
No damn degree required here.

Now it’s hard to be shaken from sleep,
Dates are weathered, every precipice foreign.

Only solace left is in your brothy stew,
or chicken soup—skip the meat, extra carrots.

But as the garden shrinks, lacking cool, crisp kohlrabi.

And all modern differences seem to dissolve in the air.
The firewood stops piling up.
No more Hungarian crepes.

Every facet dead,
except for the hand that steadies the same scratch.
Picking at the scab, from the ground up,
like it will revive a rotting brain.

Dumbie, as you’d say, please stop.
This almost timestamped your last day.

Can one speak the Lacuna?
I might as well describe the void
In all its radiant darkness

Watch as the carrion dances a jig
Marvel at the gibbets who welcome you in
We feed the astomatous stones a supper
Gulping down rich mossy earth
As alabaster crumbs fall into dewy pools
Sliced stone pours silkily through time
As Kronos shouts at eternity
There, the Sun inhales the light
Scattering afar bright black dust
Lo, this is the house where the dead speak
And the living lay soundless in the sand
Their ancestral halls drenched with despair
For they spill the cup of salvation
And joyously profane Her name

Look! There afar, the manacled Shade
Nobly slurping the pear from its fingers
As the Lacuna finally swallows its throne

Today is a day both rare and familiar. Tragic months before
another comes around. This will be the past that makes the
future proceed. Only what of the lack of true possession?
What of the decline spotted once again in our ascent, that
we heard in what was said in tired conversation on
sparkling evening? The altitude of pears? These figurations
were things seen by someone else in the branches and
leaves of a neighboring tree. I gave my life to waiting as if
asleep and my time was spent by others, observing me.

In the darkness I once would cry:
“How I wish that I would just die!”
Alas, despite my heavy breath
A voice called: “There’s more to life left”

In my youth I lived with despair
Afraid that none actually cared
Abused as a child by a cruel man
And even faced an attempt by my uncle’s hand

The family I lived with at birth,
More than less, failed to see love’s worth
And so I drifted off by and by
Struggling to fight the urge to die

“Why am I even here?”
My frustrations would jeer
The scissors sliced into my arm
A failed ritual to release myself from harm

Yet, what more could I say?
There was little that could brighten my day
Such was the harsh truth
For a devastated, beaten youth

Nightmares plagued me every night
Scenes depicted from my childhood’s plight
“I just wanted the badman to fade!”
So, why was it that he stayed?

Depression grew and grew like a fungus
My heart and joy was the corpse, I confess
In tears, I decided to reach out for a final call
I phoned the only friend I had and explained it all

My tears made it harder to speak,
With every word my throat became weak
However, there was something unexpectedly said
My friend would hate me if I were willingly dead

A spark of realization made my heart see
There was someone who truly cares about me
From that day forward I did vow:
“I will remain alive somehow”

Even then, times were difficult at best
And I felt a burning sorrow within my chest
But I had to come to realize that I was more
Than the little girl from traumatic scenes of before

As though I have taken a new chance
To free myself from melancholy’s dance
“My old self can no longer stay,
I must take a new form from her decay”

There are instances that I wished I could forget
Yet, every pain had a new lesson met
The person I am couldn’t live without the old
And so I’m ready to confess it bold

I have died and begun a life anew,
Without my friend I would not be here telling you
I have died and taken a new identity in the same
In short, I finally forged my own name

Khala Azris Grace,
Is the ‘who’ of this face
As for ‘what’ I am, well-
I’m a gender fluid, panromantic, caedsexual-

Though most importantly I must declare,
I’m an artist who now has care-
To weave words into tales is my dream
So that others don’t fall apart at their heartstrings

Remember, live the life that is given to you
You will find that there’s much that you can do
Neither entity nor human can steal your identity
So keep close to the ‘who’ you are honestly

From this future membrane
window I’ve launched a drone
to dispatch a noisy insect. Actually,
I said destroy but everyone knows drones
won’t kill, only deliver. As if we forgot
they used to be weapons. These days,
even whining flies get taxied, then deposited
on the straggly clump passing for canopy
and signaling the last stop: Behold!
The reclamation pod: last stop of the living,
or first stop of the dead, democratically
inviting poets and flies alike
to become nothing then something
reordered and new.

In this version of the future, we actually listened
to the engineers and the experts just enough
to have reinforced the thinning bridge
above oblivion where our machines
built a hive to keep us tucked safe
inside. Outside is occupied
only by machines, insects and drones. Some defiant
fauna. Our artificial Hermes have full charge.
Do they hum? Whirr? No one living knows.

We resent their liberty. Envy their purpose.
Oh to fly in the radiance unsinged!
Machines adapt their shapes to more exactly
fit specific tasks. No one alive can know for sure.
We guess at unseen factories attending
unguarded docks stacked with multicolored crates.

One creation myth attributes
colors to a distant human, a decider, who commanded
changes in the palette every three months from when we
had seasons. Oh this was way
way back when people designed everything,
even machines, and back when people decided
everything for everybody and not
everybody survived it.

Another myth says the seasons are still there
just invisible to all but the faithful,
assuring us that the invisible, if indefinite,
remains plausible. We can’t see them but know
there must be hundreds of unique machines

making, packaging, gathering information, occasionally
data leaking our secrets because machines will gossip
but never apologize nor forget, just ardently collect
us scrap by scrap without explanation.
Perhaps for some future book telling all that’s left
of a world we’ve barely seen. Some
waited for a book release but eventually we knew
it’s not for us.
It’s for after us.

Watching them, I’ve also wondered
If our machines categorize us as garden?
Or weeds. Do they prefer round numbered
flavored data or favor armored
parcels for their insectish texture?
Once they could have ranked us
by income or efficiency. Now we are weighed
against the sagging sentiment in our mail.

How much longer will they oblige
our passionate insistence we would
surely have done better
if only we’d known. Alas! We were duped!
Somebody said the guy at the wheel could
drive: turns out he’d relied on chauffeurs
but it never came up before he
made it to the final round. He stole off in a rocket
in the middle of the night. That was the last
we heard.

Now only drones and insects go. The rest
of us shrunk to fit vacuum-packed lives. Two
windows, two sinks, two lights, one bed—two
occupants enclosed by amber walls that thin to
to clear. One window for each occupant ,
whether waking or sleeping or
comatose with watching. Some of us write.

Outside, second shift drones
deliver fresh stationary before they unfurl
nets broad enough to sift charge from the sky.

Our daily season begins with first charge
suspended between
optimism and waning resolve.
Machines repair and operate the hive,
performing human tasks now
alien to memory.

All of us watch, but some
build a cult of conspiracy, recording drone
trails for evidence of their ineffable plans.
At least, machines will not build guns.

We know. We tried. Definitely we ordered
swords but received farming implements.
One guy protested, “they’re mocking us,”
but it didn’t catch on because no one
else believed machines can laugh, so
probably just a glitch. Next time let’s try
binoculars. See what we get.

Meanwhile, first shift drones wait until assigned.
Are they summoned by serial number or do they all
have names these days?
The first season is shopping.
What to order? There was something.
Tooth? Thumb? Search essentials. Scan
purchase history, but nothing.
It is coming to me. Dig something. Dig
nity, was it? Rare now, but once more common
back when we still walked roads we built and
ate plants we grew right out of dirt. Back
when we created and destroyed with the same hands.
It was surely dignity that propped us up beneath the open sky,
unafraid of its terrible weather. Back
before we ate the world. Before
we voted by text at the pageant’s close. Before we
organized the world into grocery aisles.

We’re over here in perishables, dear. Let’s dare confess
the dirty truth out loud.
Even in this future, we die. We tell ourselves

this is but one possible death told in one possible
dialect. This ending’s actually
kinder than most where by now we’re all
extinct as the farting dinosaurs.

We’ve got a team working on spinoffs but
so far, this
is the gentlest decline.

Our organic brains can nonetheless sustain
belief enough to gamble. Others pray, begging for
divine reprieve, but most of us accept it’s
a DIY job. Thus we wake

each identical day before first charge,
prodding our paper witnesses awake, make them
testify
of course we would have done
better if only, if only
. . . we’d done better. This is how I start, today.
This time I begin the story with do better—

Today’s heroine is promising—an engineer who
speaks only math. With ease, she flatters variables
to fix, making introductions until they are known intergers.
Cassandra, sees the bridge, the collapse, the whole
thing but humans mostly don’t talk in math.

She weaves the thing from spun theory and abacus string,
knotting the tapestry with primes, gilding it with fractional
topography. She will do better and this time surely
they’ll listen.

Today’s heroine is neither beautiful nor a frail consumptive.
She’s spectral, trans
formative, becoming algebra, then argument then
a recipe book for do better.

Second charge approaches, and this days memory
of the future is resolved,
clothespinned up to dry. We each sign and enclose
obligatory fees with whatever pragmatics
remain in custom.

Perhaps this will be the night
our weak, biological eyes will read
a future we might agree to build. Math
becomes a common tongue.

As every morning, this morning we affirmed
to mirror selves these five words
“We contain all possible futures.”

Really all we need is one
human future with a workable
ever after.

I was born under a fluttering flag,
Raised in the symphony of patriotism.
Honor and blind loyalty were served at breakfast.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.”

In time, my suffragette great-grandmother whispered in my ear:
We can be more.
So I shrugged off the good-girl cloak,
Took to the streets,
Asked questions and
Let my pen loose.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the
free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of
the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of
grievances.”

I listened to the elders,
Learned from those who marched before,
Used my privilege to teach others,
Raised my voice and my daughters
To be loud and righteous.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—

And on this day,
This star-spangled day of celebration
This rockets red glare day,
This glorious gaslighting day,

I long for what I thought my country could be.
Weep at backward steps,
Rage as men with twisted smiles and hearts of greed,
March over the graves of those who gathered

In Philadelphia
In Seneca Falls
In Selma
In Stonewall.

Now let us begin.
Now let us re-dedicate ourselves to the long and bitter,
but beautiful, struggle for a new world.”

Now the roaring in my head quiets
And I sit waiting.
Waiting to hear
The murmurs of Great Grandmother
Of Ruth, of Harriett, of Rosa.
I wait with a pounding heart and a sad soul,
Wait to know how to fight the next fight.

With fear for our democracy, I dissent.

R.T. Dake

With gratitude to my co-authors:
Thomas Jefferson,
James Madison, Langston Hughes,
Martin Luther King Jr,
and Sonia Sotomayor

Ice-cold green eyes or just slits
into the vortex of her mind
sensuously licking her thin lips
observing the beheading
slightly amused by the surprised look
upon the victims face
“What a pity,”she sighs
“All that blood gone to waste.”