Bronte Billings
The Anthropocene Debate
You beat your naked feet against asphalt and hot sand.
You keep running. That’s the rule. You’ve loved five boys in your life
with only two names. They were often the same with different hair and dark gap smiles.
The swelling of your atrium against your cardiac notch,
your organs are touching. You’re closer to the fraying layers of your skin.
Look, the boys tell you it’s not about playing.
Your very roots inflame, what did doctor’s call it? Bronchiolitis Obliterans.
The scarring and bloating of the limbs inside your lungs.
You’re breathing in chlorine no, sulfur, no oxides in all their nitrite forms.
Your mother used to take her Marlboro lights in the garage, disappearing
sometime in the afternoon to shed her rod burned stubs. It feels
like that. Like seeing the dot of her burning in the garage.
You can’t be here. You know that
but you run your feet along those crust crushed layers
the earth rejects you and all the boys bounding over manmade catastrophes crumbling
at your weight. You can keep up. You can be destructive. You can be the whooping cries.
The cyclical nature is never fair. An elbow clips your trachea,
the force of your air smashed from your alveoli.
Those tiny air sacs in your lungs press
to empty tissue pockets. You are still,
the stillness of crumpling salt heavy
drops and your lips dry puckering around braces.
You have nothing
to show for yourself. The world keeps running without you,
the ache of your feet, the pockets of blood
blistering by the crooks of your toes.
The boys, they never ask why you’re crying.
You’re just so small.
You keep running. That’s the rule. You’ve loved five boys in your life
with only two names. They were often the same with different hair and dark gap smiles.
The swelling of your atrium against your cardiac notch,
your organs are touching. You’re closer to the fraying layers of your skin.
Look, the boys tell you it’s not about playing.
Your very roots inflame, what did doctor’s call it? Bronchiolitis Obliterans.
The scarring and bloating of the limbs inside your lungs.
You’re breathing in chlorine no, sulfur, no oxides in all their nitrite forms.
Your mother used to take her Marlboro lights in the garage, disappearing
sometime in the afternoon to shed her rod burned stubs. It feels
like that. Like seeing the dot of her burning in the garage.
You can’t be here. You know that
but you run your feet along those crust crushed layers
the earth rejects you and all the boys bounding over manmade catastrophes crumbling
at your weight. You can keep up. You can be destructive. You can be the whooping cries.
The cyclical nature is never fair. An elbow clips your trachea,
the force of your air smashed from your alveoli.
Those tiny air sacs in your lungs press
to empty tissue pockets. You are still,
the stillness of crumpling salt heavy
drops and your lips dry puckering around braces.
You have nothing
to show for yourself. The world keeps running without you,
the ache of your feet, the pockets of blood
blistering by the crooks of your toes.
The boys, they never ask why you’re crying.
You’re just so small.
Biography
Bronte Billings lives in Northeast Ohio with her not so balding black cat beauty. She earned her MFA in poetry through the NEOMFA. Bronte is the recipient of the 2015 & 2016 Academy of American Poets Prize and the 2017 Leonard Trawick Award. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Barnhouse, Bone Bouquet, Pussy Magic, Pinwheel, Anti-Heroine Chic, Jenny Magazine, and Salt Water Soul.
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