∧
font size
∨

The ads promised that Amazing Live
Sea Monkeys would hatch

Anne Gorrick

This possibility, for the population of the rich world at least, is somehow more terrifying than apocalypse, yet we don’t want to talk about it. What would happen if we did? —Paul Kingsnorth

Yet the most likely result is that America and Europe would linger
Some animals are more equal than others
I’m undecided as to who gets the award
If something were to happen to take Bjorn out of the picture... Terrifying
If we want to buy cheap stuff we will have to employ less people
no matter how many “downsize” articles are written
At the last minute we are saved by a superhero
We’ve slid into a world that keeps tabs
“I thought you said we weren’t going to do this,” she says
We talk more about the blood moons
He’s not a full Windrunner yet, but he’s made a lot of progress
He owed more money than he could possibly repay
to double the world’s production of lithium-ion batteries
I imagine any civilization out there will just want to... talk
We’re using more wireless than ever
while a ton of weed fetches a bit more than a ton of bananas
He knew it would hurt him badly enough
The sky grows darker
I know it seems like I’m an attacking science but it’s more subtle than that

Drown me in your silence
Wellbeing has flatlined
The discussion grew rhizomatically
You’d feel more autobiographical, even if you’re not
It’s more viscerally fascinating

We’re sitting in the lobby of terrifying ancestry, dinosaur cohabitation
and the apocalypse keeps galloping backward in time
We’ve become a self-sufficient food
Somehow out of that hideous nightmare he obtained two more stars
We might have at least 50 years of freedom
The ads promised that Amazing Live Sea Monkeys would hatch
We can talk bailouts, snap cards, zombie hordes, 40 city blocks of squalor
Self harm took more lives than war
Rejection is in fact recognition
We may call it a border, an abject referent
Later that day my best friend came by in a canoe and we paddled all around
If you want to find your way around DEAD CITY, don’t bother with a map
We need to believe that the demon is locked up and cannot get out
and because he was and has since become even more of a symbol
God has “more than a pen and a phone in his hand”
Why did you bleep out that word?
We have the player-character standing ... trauma that repeats itself
and we don’t understand empires terribly well

We’re a little more complicated than most sky gods
We obey the law of physics
There was too much emphasis on tax
We’re also more complicated than a Nickelback T-shirt
If you want to go all retro and cheesy, with all the Starbucks closing
Kathmandu feels manic, chaotic, a cult of clouds
My soul isn’t quite in peak-season form
If you want something a little different for decoration
try these for internal deception
We pretend we don’t have to die
The clones just want comedic skills
His comment about heaven somehow evolved into other people
Predictably, this document calls for less religion

Someone of course then suggested we walk around the room
rehearsing the same ideas that drove medieval writers
We usually get a backlash of cheap
in the place we go to look for somebody
Stop reading if you haven’t seen this film yet
I didn’t want anyone else running or flying headlong into the thread
I got married and had a child and, somehow, managed to keep my wife
The world of crime fiction is so lilywhite
more than skin deep and greener
Who would have thought that epistemology could be crucial to our survival?
The attack is scheduled, prophetically, to become even more hateful

The book cut through my lens
It still feels too much like a bullet point list of events that happen
I present it here unedited as a document, if nothing else, of the choking
If we are to win the war against sleep
belief would mark these fictions as crazy
BMW limousines are so well insulated that passengers don’t even hear the
     road
The rumor was no more than an experiment
We could all heavily invest in public robotics
We would’ve questioned who was the more monstrous
not in the way a songbird does
I don’t want to go into this in too much detail
but I think your sight is fantastic
It would be neat if it was responsible for the meteor
Snowfalls will create autonomous off-world colonies