Zhenya puts her foot down and drives through a

storm of tears across the state boundaries;

over canyons, mountains, deserts, plains

into the great volcanic caldera,

and the national park sprawling over it

like a gecko in the sun. Sulfurous

jets eject faithfully from steaming mud

into the sultry mid-year air. Zhenya

totters drearily round the boiling springs,

wishing a fissure open up the very

earth beneath and swallow her. She wills

the planet’s crust eruct its magma up

over the capped tourists with their offspring

taking smirking selfies with their cams, up

over the troupes of snowflake college kids

led by ageing hippy geology

lecturers, up over the brand new-age

vegan hipsters with their healing crystals and

Sanskrit tattoos, out over the misfit

loner out on a day-trip dressed in black

and tan packing heat, up and out over

the pairs of hands-held lovers peering deep

transfixed into the pitchy craters of

each other’s souls, over the sing-song of

drilling marines and the swing of

fracking machines, over cradles rocked by

saddened lullabying postpartum moms,

over the half-lives of exurbia,

and freeways and diners and shopping malls

and up on out over the out-of-date

nuclear waste storage facilities, on

over the wily old crones and brash young

bloods in Congress, cooing over donors

in lobbies, up out over the copper

lady in the harbor, seawards; over

lost Atlantis, scooping up one full half

a hemisphere of oh so weary, not

so brand-new civilized world off along

in the mournful ashfall of its uplifting

wake of petrifying cloud. Would the world

end thus, Zhenya wonders dreaming and throws

herself in.

Photo by Nicolasintravel on Unsplash