Featured Poem

• american elegy

  Melanie Manuel

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  lately i’ve been thinking about that asteroid,
  the one my third grade teacher, mr. vigil said would end us

  within the year—what its name was, if it ever had one—
  was it stuck elsewhere in the dark echoes, too far into another

  century—or the implosion of the sun meant to kiss our bones
  into ash the way terminator 2: judgment day does,

  i remember, afterwards, seeing a commercial: mummified
  yzma from the emperor’s new groove, all purples and feathers,

  an afterlife immortalized in thirty seconds, then darkness
  of the screen. i cried in the shower. prayed to god. wondering

  if there was an answer. any answer. it’s not the first time
  i’ve known it—i knew death before all of this, without knowing,

  really—i was three, when lola miguela passed, the details
  in glimmers: white box, body as still as the deepest slumber,

  i told her, wake up—it’s time to go—confused
  by my mom’s tears, the proneness in lola’s body, the very lack of her

  embrace—the heft of this kind of leaving—a permeation
  unwilling to wilt away—what’s left is

  a photo of us, where i sat on her knee & she held me
  precious this little thing, not privy to knowing

  what the world can be, how it can strip away
  nothing and everything all the same.

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