Anna Ziering
Vision as the Ice Shelf Collapses
First ragheads and the other aliens
Then dark skin on any body up to übermensch
Then the dykes (fuck ’em first) and the faggots (fucked too)
Next any woman left who won’t shut her trap
Then faith then hopes then forests and fields
Then the factories run out of raw materials
And shoppers who with no distractions left
run hot wild into the streets and are flattened
Then the white mattering men
and the children they fathered in foolhardy optimism
by fires by thirst by rising seas
Then the Earth shrunken to one hard
cold kernel from which nothing grows
no hot weeping not even hate
and this will be the only, final safety.
Anna Ziering‘s poems and reviews have appeared in Skylark Review, 236, The Rumpus, The Slag Review, and other journals. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut and holds an MFA in Poetry from Boston University. A recipient of the Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize (2017) and the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship (2015), she teaches at the Kenyon Young Writers Workshop.
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