Aubade After Extinction
Christine Larusso

I woke up and the city was prismatic again.
Found myself reciting the names of plants that
possess: lion’s mane, baby’s breath, bee’s bliss.

I belonged to no one, I still belong to none. Just
as soon, I tell myself I want. Still yet, drought
tinkers around in the loops between thoughts:

I am roughly-just, taken by a new specter.
She’s lonely like me, but swift to deliver
the latest news. I succumb to the age-old practice

of counting sheep and end at the edge of the fence,
not a leg left, not a drop to drink. The split parts
of a seascape I once knew, the diamonds of my sleep.

Is the chaparral real or just a sketch well-lit
by a bright monitor? Time will tell. And in the dreams
that stretch like the long arms of a palm pining

for its lover, I say goodbye to each species I never
got to know. What fantasy is left for what we still
imagine as night, if not comfort by couplets?

The sweet two-by-two, trotting along and looking.

Christine Larusso holds a BA from Fordham University (Lincoln Center) and an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the Colorado Review, the Los Angeles Times, Wildness, The Literary Review, Pleiades, Women's Studies Quarterly, Sycamore Review, Prelude, Court Green, Narrative, and elsewhere. She is the 2017 winner of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize, and has been named a finalist for both the Orlando Poetry Prize and the James Hearst Poetry Prize. Her poem, "Lunar Understanding," was nominated for a Pushcart. She was a Producer for Rachel Zucker's podcast, Commonplace, and helped launch the Commonplace School. She currently lives in Los Angeles.