The world was suffocating at the end.
Strange to think here,
in this other world like a dead lung,
ions stripped away by solar winds
while Earth still cradled in her mother’s arms

It was thirty years too early for this.
The last of the reefs disintegrating
off the Florida Keys
Pawpaw took his last breath,
shouted it from twin barrels,
painted himself on the walls like an anemone
warning us of a poison sting.
The world coughing just a bit.

By the time the ice unwound,
spilling its guts into the warming oceans,
everyone was choking,
rioting around Space X launchpads.
The oceans never reached Tennessee,
but everything west
of the Mississippi was a desert.

We paid our way in side jobs and sex,
a few dollars or yuan when we could save it.
Our faces hidden by carbon filters,
polarized lenses, motorcycle helmets;
the dust filled our dress in layers
scratching beneath our waistbands,
clawing behind our necks.

Then I lost you outside Tulsa,
and the world took one last shuddering gasp.

When I sailed offworld on a stolen lottery,
a mining contract, and the last of your oxygen,
I imagined the engines as a cremation,
your ashes returning to the oceans
that consumed our earth.

Now we work our same magic to warm another planet,
to give life back to a lost world,
farming methane and ammonia from Titan
to boost the atmosphere on Mars.
But the future is hardly science fiction.
Perhaps we evolved.
Perhaps we simply learned to breathe.