I’m no good at endings, so let me
start, and start again:
the world is ending every day.
Each week blooms brighter and hotter
than the last, as if Mother Earth has descended
into fever. Fires churn her delicate parts, turn her
ecosystems to kindling and ash.
Listen: the grind is killing us both.
Now: I am tired every day in the very same way
I was as a child coming home from the fair.
The flashing lights of the Ferris wheel burned
neon behind my eyes, the confectionary
sugar sat sickly sweet in my gut, the blue-ribbon hogs
haunted me with their blank gazes and hairy chins
and bignesses. I sat small in the backseat
and dangled my sneakers. I was a balloon
deflated, all the red rubber, none of the air.
(A feeling I would come to learn.)
Somehow, as my tired eyes chased telephone wires,
I knew in that moment I’d never return.
Yes, the fair cropped up yearly like a perennial
weed, and my parents, eerie blue
in the car’s front seat, would bring me back, and back again,
but a ghost of me, two holes cut in a sheet,
remained trapped at the top of the wheel,
turning latches, kicking unlaced feet,
longing for the ride to end.
–
Ashley Wagner is a queer writer, reader, and roller-skater living in Baltimore. She is the poetry editor for Ligeia Magazine, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in FOLIO, Stentorian Bitch, Door is a Jar, and others.