Canada on fire; ionized burnt dusk here
in Pittsburgh. Long summer sunsets the color
of aborted yolk – ash in eyes, mouths of sulfur.
So goes the blood dimmed tide and bare ruin’d choir.
No quotation marks, now the cage of Google.
A reference, reference, reminding us of quotes. Everything is like a movie or a comic, some post- apocalyptic book recalled from school.
Rather than twilight the sky’s lurid, obscene;
a smear of orange and yellow and red, but it’s still beautiful to see, this dusk of Anthropocene.
My throat is sore, the noses run, our lungs filled.
A campfire smell lingers for days and days even after it rains, all now emblazoned.
Ed Simon is Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University and the editor of Belt Magazine, as well as a staff writer for Literary Hub. The author of several books, his most recent title is Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain.
LISTEN TO THE AUTHOR DISCUSS THIS POEM AND MORE WITH PORCH CO-FOUNDER GARETH HIGGINS, AT www.theporch.substack.com/p/the-porch-podcast-sonnet-for-the