by John Dorroh
When Carrots Rained From the Sky
Even this ends: the snake
who swallows his own tail
has been choked to quiet, he rests
in the dust and the ash
stenciled with the names of those
we love, those names
who are first to leave but whose taste lingers
and coats our sun-blackened mouths.
Across the ocean, there is a pig adrift
in an immense grief
and there are carrots raining from the sky
an orange rain
that remembers a time
when what was stripped
and what remained was held
in our hands, now lost
to the deadening acoustic,
this edge of expanding ruin—
this agonal gasp of scale.
Ingrid L. Taylor’s stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Horse Egg Literary, Zooscape, the Horror Writers Association’s Poetry Showcase volumes VI and VII, Gaia: Shadow and Breath, vol.3, and others. She has an MFA from Pacific University and is a former artist-in-residence at Playa. She lives in the desert with a black cat, a Newfoundland dog, and a yard full of pigeons and wild rabbits. When she’s not writing, she works as a veterinarian for an international non-profit. For news about her writing and adventures with her animals, find her on Instagram @tildybear.
John Dorroh is too easily distracted from things that matter. He seems to thrive best in quiet places with few people who, for the most part, talk too much. ‘I asked a friend if she’d seen the strange and beautiful clouds yesterday, and she looked at me as if I might be bonkers.’ Perhaps the pandemic has caused him to pay attention to the natural world. He’s a Southerner living in the Midwest where you can clearly see weather fronts coming in. He is a frequent contributor to Feral and many other journals. His cell phone photography once paid for a nice meal at a sushi restaurant.