Look at What We’ve Given to the Otherwise Empty Spaces by Stephen Lackaye

Escalators going in a building flooded out, and they’re still
playing “Glory of Love,” even though we know it’s over.
Elsewhere, maybe there’s a place that retains our dignity,
a library’s patient alphabet, a copse of beech we built
a fence around. We put all this faith in edifice,
and left the world a mall, when we’d be better off buried
ruins than Rome: lines of stones that once connoted walls
six feet beneath the plains of some new species.
Wouldn’t we be as gnomic, as unknowable as girls
laughing at a table in the food court to separate boys
on metal chairs bolted to the floor? Already, five of the six
languages they couldn’t muster have turned to grit
on a horse’s eye, the wind stripping its sides as it bends
to its rest in the field. Another late language is barely humming
synthpop down the strut that twists above the atrium
like the last, bewildered cetacean. If we could be misunderstood,
I think that we might be forgiven. Let future scholars parse
the skylit roof caved in, the carp overflown from
the ornamental fountain, this temple where the basking fish
dreamed of their ascensions. So, we brought the carp,
and so, we brought the flood upon them. So, we adjusted
the wavelengths of light—didn’t we—in self-sacrifice?
It’s fair to ask if what remains is an order or disorder,
when the organism lengthens, fins distend to wings,
and water’s shaken from the novel exercise of shoulders.
We imagined half of everything. Wherever we had to guess,
we got it wrong but were undaunted: the gall without
the consequence. What sort of monsters will they make of us,
the coming, cautious generations, when they find our
final bones where we lay down among the horses?

Stephen Lackaye’s collection of poems, Self-Portrait in Dystopian Landscape, won the Unicorn Press First Book Prize and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. New poems can be found in The Southern Review and Southern Indiana Review. Stephen lives in Oregon with his wife and daughters.