our sky is sick with smoke and

time is left gnarled and congested and

the light made illegible and

I am eating plant-based meatballs at an Ikea food court and

buying new bed sheets and a bookshelf and

the facsimile of a future is less fictive 

than our incompetent blood orange of a sun.

It isn’t yet my personal apocalypse and

I know pity and guilt and fear are not productive but

fires are gulping at my present and

I am driving less and going vegetarian about it.

Breaths burn the stretch of my neck and

the snake-skin of smoke is crushing and cosmic

and it is not the white of negative space 

it is an asthmatic old-testament giant and

it makes the sun superficial and small and 

it swallows and 

it swallow

s and it swal

lows and it 

swallows and 

the intestines should make me claustrophobic but

they don’t.

It is not spectacle, but highway hypnotism, and

the only reason it doesn’t feel real is because I don’t see it in art.

Robin Robinson is a poet, playwright, writer, and tea-enthusiast from Placerville, California. They are currently pursuing a degree in Literature at UC Santa Cruz.