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Apocalypse Déjà Vu
At the end of the world the dishes pile in the sink;
my children, who placed bets on which dogs
would survive longest without us, the scrapyard chihuahua
or the blue heeler who stopped bringing us dead
creatures when she saw how it made me cry,
stayed with me when the last caravan left.
When they asked if I believe in life on other globular
things spinning toward emptiness, I promised
the real joy has always been imagining endlessness
with them. We almost thought to scrub the kitchen
before the end. Almost thought to find matches
for all the unmatched socks in the basket.
Instead, we fashioned capes from old winter coats.
Set the dogs loose. Ran with them toward the treeline
till the great dark widened its maw & we kept running.
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Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the Southwestern desert and the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices. Jenn is the author of five full-length poetry collections, most recently Belly to the Brutal (Wesleyan University Press), and the novels Trinity Sight, Jubilee, and River Woman, River Demon (Blackstone Press). Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, POETRY, and Salon and has won many national awards, including The Southwest Book Award, New Ohio Review’s Poetry Prize, Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, the Pinch Journal Poetry Prize, and Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry Prize.
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Running Away. Oil on canvas. [artist unknown]