After the night that the sea turned into stone so solid you could walk along it, we stopped fighting the changes we knew would come. Even as the trees were softening, their bark for the hungry to scrape and scrape and spread it on whatever bread they could beg or bake. Even when the grass became a golden pelt, warm to the touch, and rose and fell like the back of an animal breathing.

I had one red crayon left for listing, one left to catalogue. How the water was salt and we drank it anyway and lived. How the yellow sun had an edge of green just before twilight. And didn’t the moon smile at us with an uncle’s smile?

We didn’t expect anyone, any visitors, any army or cloud or magician or weather to arrive and save us. Some of the old thought to turn in/to sleep early. They hung their hammocks in a copse of trees west of the city and swung back and forth, a little, and then not at all. How they slept. We never knew there could be such sleeping, and from time to time, we saw a new hammock among the stilled ones. I know what you’re thinking—the bodies? What of them. But I tell you the old became like grasshoppers, husks of the bodies they once were, dry and barely anything. Their voices pared down to a few high notes then a note and then a quiet that was something you could lean into, thick but weightless.

Maybe some went on and are yet living, among the young who feed and listen to the stories they invent or remember or half remember and stitch together with threads they pluck from the hopes of those breathing. Stitched and in time unraveling, but not yet unraveling.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a donation from Kewayne Wadley during our annual Kickstarter.]