when the Pacific turns to acid
              & the clouds refuse to seed
              & the carbon doesn’t capture
              & the homies retweet Candace Owens
              & take their Ls on crypto
              & we remember that it used to rain sometimes in July
              & the subduction zone has let itself be known
              & I’ll have to do to you
                       what I’ll do to you
                                when I get hungry

Take care

 

in knowing

 

in the back alleys of our burning cities,
if you seek sweet bread,
you will find it

Follow your nose
Fill your plate with eyes, ears & doves

Nod to the foul-mouthed aunties
at the oven who slave away—
even in the half-past
last of days

Listen to the voice inside you saying:

              You know,

              you worry too much.

 

 

---

 

VINCENT ANTONIO RENDONI is the author of A Grito Contest in the Afterlife, winner of the 2022 Catamaran Poetry Prize for West Coast Poets as selected by Dorianne Laux. His work has appeared/will appear in Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Sycamore Review, Quarterly West, The Vestal Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions multiple times.

 

The art that appears alongside this piece is by AMY RENEE WEBB.