Charlie Leppert
Scrolling Through Facebook in the Midst of the Impending Climate Catastrophe
A Breitbart status declares its concerns about how Black Transgender Communist Jews are stealing resources from Honest, Christian, White Men in what was once Your City.
You didn’t think you followed their page, but every once in a while something strange finds its way in front of you.
A New York Times editorial discussing how Gen Z is killing the feudal agricultural communities in western Russia by refusing to inhabit the fringes of the nuclear fallout zone or emigrate any further south than St. Petersburg.
The faces of the workers, sunburned and emaciated, stares out from the screen.
A girl from your high school feeling sooooooo blessed, posing with her husband and the Canadian soldiers at the Alaskan border, to which they have been traveling, by foot, for six months.
The soldiers are even smiling, and her sister has left a comment, asking if any of those hunky Canadians are single.
A Wall Street Journal report, composed by a New York City stock broker waist deep in raw sewage and oil, on the current market value of Elon Musk’s TeslArk™ in the aftermath of his assassination by Christian Armageddonists.
get it? he had Tweeted after the project was announced, his smart house auto-posting his 3 AM, designer-drug ramblings, while he sat motionlessly under a ceiling fan deep into the night. TeslArk™ like Tesla and Ark. Im a fucking superhero.
A Buzzfeed quiz asking which Idaho Survivalist Compound should YOU try to infiltrate before the upcoming forest fires season?
You think you’ve already taken that one, though.
A picture of the sun rising over the edge of the Earth, taken from space, captioned “Love this view <3,” posted by the mission attempting to reach Mars and establish a colony there that had launched ten years ago.
It was one of the first posts they had made, and every day the same picture and caption was posted again, endlessly clogging their newsfeed with identical, final sunrises.
You have 1 Memory Today, according to your notifications. You posted 36 years ago, on March 12, “uugh, when will this finally END??” under a picture of the backyard you haven’t seen in twenty years, cloaked in snow you haven’t seen in fifteen.
The light reflected off the snow dazzles the camera, and beyond the bare trees is a clear, blue sky, crisp and devoid of clouds. The sun is on its way toward noon.
You like the memory, return to the present.
Charlie Leppert’s work has appeared in Mind Over Gender, The Labyrinth, and the Validation Project, among other websites and publications. He has been awarded the Stephen W. Chung Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and a Center for Peace, Justice, and Reconciliation Scholarship from Bergen Community College. Leppert is queer poet and student from northern New Jersey whose poetic work focuses on queerness, the complexity of American identity, mental health, faith, and resistance.
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