1 poem
by Felix Lecocq
Felix Lecocq is a recent graduate of the University of Chicago. His writing has been published by Teen Vogue, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2020 Les River Fellowship for Young Novelists and is working on his first book.
This poem was shortlisted for the 2020 Peach Gold in Poetry with guest judge ALOK.
Holocene
The infallible Becky T from bio says
the world isn’t going to end today
or tomorrow or even in two hundred years
& I think that I must be the only person
who has a subscription to the New Yorker
these days so I grimace into my Americano
as the guy she’s with laughs like a church bell
I imagine them dying young & oh
so bitter about it & I briefly mourn them before
I leave for class It is such a relief
to be queer and to have learnt the art of
dying young I will be thankful to wake
at 40 years old in a bathtub of teeth
How Becky T will beg me
to teach her childlessness,
how to live horribly & hypothetically
like the rest of the wretched She will ask me how
I bear it—the hunger, the radiation
while we wear disease like scarlet
silk robes (it is too hot for velvet)
dance in the acid rain (we don’t feel our skin)
luxuriate in the fallout, the glamour of climate
DIDN’T YOU KNOW?
Bioluminescence is the new black!
Those poor kitschless bastards don’t even know
our fabulous devastation, the sweet
perfume of endocrine disruption We
DRAG MOTHERS OF THE APOCALYPSE
cast our cockroach children into the rising ocean
We watch them swim & learn to swallow
loving the water with their bumbling innocent
faggotry When the END OF THE WORLD comes
it will be agonizing & gorgeous: a slow
electric dusk aching the horizon in all its amber openness
When the END OF THE WORLD comes
I’ll be standing on my back porch
with you, with my hand on your shoulder
& we will face the godlessness together
with all of our house plants freshly watered.