Jaiden Geolingo

dystopia where we're out past midnight

We hurried out of my barren Toyota after the tsunami turned into a megaphone. Candleflame
cordons the doorway in our apartment, electricity whittled into intimate black. In the living
room, Frank Ocean comes on while the windowsills collect soot— & in our right hands, maybe
there is another love song; I haven’t checked, but don’t you remember the violins pried open, its
hollowness hereditary to the radio station? Suppose I do, & instead of slow-dancing to White
Ferrari, we could be saving our oxygen tanks for later. This is the part where the grenades
infiltrate our back porch, our bones christened so stillborn with shrapnel. Suppose the TNT never
reached us, & we were baptized instead on Southern prairies. The midnight corpse-cold.
Hollywood could make diamonds out of this slaughterhouse. Now, the film reel: guttural litany
& dreams siphoned from asphalt water; the overgrown weeds in our homemade garden watching
our feet dispel prayers. Tonight, sinkholes will gape open in the neighborhood & we’ll be eating
vodka pasta & continue dancing & suppose everything is an apocalypse. Suppose we get to
swallow the sun. Suppose we’ll come home with mouths made for mouths.