poem
Volume 32, Number 4

Carbon Bigfoot

Her tiny sculpted haunches hardly depress the cushioned leather of the outsized Lexus SUV which she rides like a polished afterthought. And though this one is a hybrid, she’s used up and left 8 gas-gulpers to their fate without a care. Sees no problem there. We think she could be bothered by the silence of the electric motor. Some action she’s missed: the whirling electrons in a static steel girder; a scale on the ass of a python, cells changing every day. Nature’s unseen, favored collateral. But there’s no time for that: she’s already planted a grave-shaped footprint her progeny’s progeny could not fill and probably will not live to see, and who can fault her? While the shades behind the smoked windshield deflect the harmful rays from her pipe-bomb pupils, leaving them free to rest where they may. And since she remains impervious to it all, it could be worth considering the possibility that, in her stead, you yourself might wish to take the blame. In which case she would not give a fuck.


—LC Gutierrez