by Janis Butler Holm
At the End of Everything
When the last of the sunlight
meets the last of the ice &
last people have left in their little boats,
when stars have snuffed their matches &
comets portend nothing to no one,
all will be easy as atoms,
scattering, a gift of entropy
wrapped in unbecoming gauze.
It’s music I’ll miss,
from building, implicit innuendos
of Ravel to David Coverdale’s
bluntly-stated same.
All that 1990s rage &
1970s rhythm—I hope
some memory of them remains
in hydrogen & oxygen
I once was, collapsing
back into a finite point.
Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy. His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble. His seventh collection, Tell Us How to Live, is forthcoming in 2024 from Fernwood Press.
Janis Butler Holm served as Associate Editor for Wide Angle, the film journal, and currently works as a writer and editor in sunny Los Angeles. Her prose, poems, art, and performance pieces have appeared in small-press, national, and international magazines. Her plays have been produced in the U.S., Canada, Russia, and the U.K. https://www.janisbutlerholm.com
https://facebook.com/janisbutlerholm https://www.laplaywrights.org/member/Janis-Butler-Holm.