JOHNSTONE

The blue whales have stopped singing because the krill are vanishing because the oceans are warming because we are ruled by long-toothed liars whose insides are full of dead leaves. The great whales have gone silent and my bird has gone blind and there are chatbots in the basement and corpses in the corn. Under the overpass it is dry and still. You would never know that everything is dying. You should come and visit me. Meet me over there under the sepia streetlights with the strangleporn perverts and fentanyl fallen, all the stillborn scar tissue extractions from the wreckage of a banished womb, the NAFTA-noosed factory towns full of deserted buildings and the window-snarling meth towns full of deserted people, where the cries of orphaned Palestinians mingle with the cries of the last baby orangutan ever born in the wild. Meet me under the flickering lights. Bring me some smokes and a sad luck story and let's stay up late by the freeway watching the traffic get sparse. Show me the spots on your skin where life has kicked you and I will kiss them and give you a flower. The leviathans have gone quiet and the turbines are getting loud, and everything has become so strange. So sit with me on this curb under my burlap wing and let's laugh and heal and mark beauty until sunrise. Reading by Tim Foley.