Love Song for the End of Us
by Kenzie Allen

In the great die-off, the fireflies will become fewer still.
The jar, empty. The hills and exultation

dark. Vestibules crawl through the shape of an arch
slowed then dead, memory locked to the last survivor

and whatever stories they told; a cardinal returned each summer,
vanished. Perhaps my children brown in the ultraviolet.

Save any space you can.
The hum of June buffets the doors not so long before we mourn.

There was a garden. Something to pray for, even at the wake.
I want to say it was enough.

I shudder to think of the bear trap shattering bone,
his tender paw gripped in a mouth he should never encounter,

or the gills cut through clear with filament
sharp as invisible; lipless fauna surrounded by fire

on every shoreline. We've seen so many
feathered stomachs filled up with ash;

beyond doubt, no air is left—
yet the breath leaves.

Only the lights on the sidewalk tell you
anything is left to be open to be left.

The flame hailing from the sill
in candle, holy water, paper stars—

that's the tongue of this house laid bare,
wide and beckons welcome.

I have prepared the linens.
I kissed a prayer to each crevice

like cupped hands, a flower pressed
brief and capsized by mid-afternoon

bad deeds done by strange fingers,
as though you don't know where you've been.

from the book CLOUD MISSIVES / Tin House

Some of this poem was inspired by my time living in St. Louis, the “Gateway to the West” and where I used to catch fireflies, and in Trondheim, Norway, where the city and nature were so intertwined. The rest was inspired by the markers of our irrevocable impacts on this earth and the more than human world. We are bound to its future as much as it is bound to us.

Kenzie Allen on "Love Song for the End of Us"

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