We're All Martians Now

On Mars there’s no vegetation.
On Mars there’s nothing we recognize as soil.
On Mars when you look at the land, you see the naked shape of rock.
That’s all of us
after two years of COVID—
naked rock.
All the pretense is gone.
We’re bare to the suck of cold vacuum,
stupid, naked, apes. Walking ghosts.
My ribs are bone.
My eyes are interstellar darkness.
We’re dead planets orbiting a black hole.
Dead bodies don’t lie
but the truths they tell
aren’t ones you want to hear
and trajectories decay as inevitably as subatomic particles.
Our last-gasp radio noise creeps between the stars
and stripes on Mars, on Mars, on red dead Mars.

Books Available
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Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
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