(italic lines from Riley Martin)

A few of us might just wiggle out from Armageddon

on Titan rocketships as large as skyscrapers

Set for suns which are about as far as a guess

Ebbing it out like a haggler,

costing us a few more pennies of promised existence

or just another chance gone from this dissolving sphere

When this world expires

like some rotted meat left in the summer heat

We are the plight sprayed with desperate repellents

which kill nothing and retreat back into the blackness

further than our minds will handle

ii

Many suns have lived and died.

Godspeed at liftoff for this hard-bitten humanity

One way or the other YOU will live on.

The momentum will carry us away,

whatever is left of the Earth, every bit, stored only in crates

Even if you have to float as an isotope

in the vastness of space.

Every ships’ name reads “INHUMANE” on the hulls

Or show up on some other Jurassic ocean.

Emancipated, savvy & thankful

Once again you will walk.

Etching modern saviors along the insides of caves

And hopefully be as lovely as you are now.

With neighbors coexisting in breathable places never imagined

As I smooth down the avenue in my Chevy to pick you up.

Nestled in ignorance, peering in the celebration of boundless sins -

fathom upon fathoms only to betray again in endless space

— Chris Grasso