Sarah Caulfield
Some Kind of End Times
i.
Burn-out:
Noun. Definition:
Reduction of something to its basest level.
Secondary meaning: physical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress.
Informal.
Phrasal country of origin: United States.
ii.
On the news, they’ve begun talking about nuclear strikes.
The threat of being called back into dirt is one I have begun contemplating,
Idly, with a kind of distant panic.
There are footsteps where there were once children in Hiroshima.
At strange moments of the day—folding laundry, queueing for coffee,
I think about the ribbons in their hair crumbling,
The way lungs might have folded in on themselves, rendered brittle.
Death playing shadow puppets, over and over, against a rising sun
And the word we picked for it was victory—
But those were foreign children, and very far away, and it’s not a cautionary tale
until you’re choking on it.
And I think about how better poets have had better ways,
better words to gild the horror of the Earth we have built
but the lovers in Pompeii have never felt more distant.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust: the devil is a white man in a white house.
It’s a silly sort of prayer but here goes:
Not now. Not yet. Can it wait?
iii.
All my friends are dying.
All of my friends are trying to keep themselves alive.
All my friends are sewing themselves up with cheap thread, saline leaking all over the shop,
and I’m making myself smaller in the hope angels will pass over my door.
They call it compassion fatigue.
We’re building man-traps in London town to catch the homeless out now.
After all, the only thing worse than the Little Match Girl is having to look her in the eyes.
We all know my government is standing on bodies, but that’s nothing new. Look at the buildings.
The backbone of this country is made of transatlantic spines and people are starving,
but they’re always starving, everywhere, and
I don’t have anything left to spare.
They’ve stopped showing Puerto Rico on the television.
No electricity, no news: we’re both being kept in the dark.
It has been over two thousand days since there was clean water in a city in Michigan,
but they don’t sound like me when they talk, so I’m not supposed to care.
iv.
My grandmother told me a story once, about someone in the family
who walked back out of the war camps to a brave new world, rendered lucky still to be in his body—
No, I don’t remember his name. She told me he never talked about what had happened.
Language had collapsed in on itself, a black hole, a wound is an absence in the world –
All they knew was he was scared of the dark, and that each and every night,
He would put on his coat, the creases in the shoulders worn familiar
as the touch of tongue to envelope, something that ought not to sting,
He would put it on, wait until the park lights were switched off for the night,
And step inside. Over and over, until he died,
He stood there, alone in the absence of light, stuck with the velvet licking of his own memory.
I don’t know if it helped, all that exposure.
Like I said, he never talked about it.
v.
There’s something else.
There’s always something else, some fresh crisis to sink my teeth into,
Only I don’t think I can keep doing this.
My gums ache. I’m swallowing down blood.
If this is some kind of end times, honey—
Meet me at the finish.
Just don’t wait for me to catch up.
Sarah Caulfield is the author of Spine (Headmistress Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in Lavender Review, Voicemail Poems, The Griffin, and The Mays (XXIV). She has lived in Poland and Germany, and currently lives in the UK.
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