I worked too much this week

and will work too much the next.
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is diminishing–
I’m in the office sixty hours a week.
How was I supposed to know
to gaze into a distant glint?
I haven’t seen a star in years.
If not under a canopy of clouds
a canopy of smog.
If I had a kid she’d be grown now.
Instead our world is warming and
I drive down the street each day
guzzling jugs of precious resource–

we’re waiting on the water wars.
The water wars are now.

(originally published in Sybil Poetry Journal, Winter 2021)

The Bomb

It was so quiet
you could hear cows
walking on mud

pigs chewing wheat.
For a moment I wanted
as a souvenir

the certain stillness
of winter trees
of nearly everything–

but the cloud began
its parting, its rising–
smoke out the barrel

of a gun, aiming at you
an open door,
begging you to hide.

(originally published in Impspired, Fall 2021)