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A chimney skewers your bed.

A roof slices through your living room carpet.

Your bathtub ruptures: broken pipes spew everywhere,
a garage door emerges through the tiled floor. Walls crumble
like bread. Windows ram up your counters and cabinets,

and so many anxious eyes bulge against the panes.

They say there is nothing you can do.

Frying eggs at the stove or nodding off on the couch
watching TV—you will never hear their whispers leak
through the dirt as those homes below grow faster,

root and twist, burrow like lightning.

You will never know why.

All you can do is run, abandon your house
when that home below bursts like a geyser, gushes
the shreds of your house and your loved ones into the sky.

They say when you flee to look back at the new front door.

They say when it opens you must be far away, out of reach.

 

 

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a gift from Emmett Smith during our annual Kickstarter.]



Seth Wade is a tech ethicist, fiction writer, and poet. You can read more of his work in McSweeney’s, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, The Gateway Review, and Morning Moot. He’s currently working on a novel. Follow him on Twitter at @SethWade4Real.
Current Issue
28 Oct 2024

By: Anna Martino
Translated by: Anna Martino
The truth is that I don’t know how much of my life was a dream and how much was reality. Does it matter in the end?
(...) A verdade é que não sei o quanto de minha vida foi sonho e quanto foi realidade. Faz diferença, no fim das contas?
By: Bindu Tiji
Translated by: Lakshmy Nair
Now, my passion is only for deserts.
എനിക്കിനി  ആസക്തി മരുഭൂമികളോടാണ്
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Translated by: Xueting C. Ni
PX9345 is a solar system situated on the outer edge of the Milky Way. It has one star, seventeen planets, three of which are located in a habitable zone, where water is not only present, but present in large amounts.
px9345是一个处于银河系边缘的星系,它有一颗恒星,十七颗行星,其中有三颗都处在宜居带上,不仅有水,而且是大量的水。
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