The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Matthew Tuckner

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Eventually, people grew out of people. 

…………….People crying into their porchetta. 

People thinking their complexities 

…………….into mush. People performing kind acts

in bad faith, relaxing into the shade 

…………….of their gazebos, admiring their views

of the new phenomenons of weather,

…………….rising heat levels basting the clouds 

into whip-fast funnels. Silly gooses, people. 

…………….Numbskulls. People tunneling into walls

of people sidetracked by swatches of language, 

…………….hating people, loving the hating of people,

mulling over the progress of the garden,

…………….the proliferation of color, the spilling up 

& over of stinky bushes they forget the names of. 

…………….Their memory fails them, people.

They’re only people, people.  

…………….People peopling the valleyside into 

the flurry of commerce, selling trinkets 

…………….& baubles, pretty lithographs of atrocities, 

paper facsimiles of purple roses. 

…………….People weaving their planes through

chemtrails, skimming along the ozone, speeding

…………….past a hawk tangled in a balloon string. 

Queasy people, invertebrate & gorgeous

…………….in the evening light. Klutzy people, 

glossing over the tomfoolery of an oil spill.

…………….Willy-nilly people, mumpish, pregnant 

with joy, fumbling with the keypads & levers, 

…………….lowering the car window for a few fingers

of breeze, admiring the eruptions of mountains 

…………….ringing the byway, in awe of their own transience, 

their brief blips of existence, snapping 

…………….their pictures of the floodplains, 

the twirling blue pansies, the industry of beavers,

…………….the isthmus of feldspar & freeze-thaw 

that was here long before people 

…………….invented people to steal it from. 

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Matthew Tuckner received his MFA at NYU and is a PhD candidate at University of Utah. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Adroit Journal, 32 Poems, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, West Branch, The Cincinnati Review, The Missouri Review, and Poetry Daily.

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24 July 2023