You said the end of the world was an apple, 
and not because of Eve, Adam, the snake, and 
all that, but because winters in your parents’ orchards, 
the neglected apples would plummet, too heavy 
with rot and snow, and there, at the end 
of the branch, stood their ghosts, perfect glass apples 
from the ice. So too, the end of the life, 
us, and everything, gone, too heavy, 
unfathomable worms at the core, 
but lingering on like a bird hovering in place, 
a detached shadow. 

Our debris is still out in space, 
the moon covered in fossilized feces from astronauts. 
(This part wasn’t a joke, you insisted. Rocket ships must 
weigh the same going there and back home, 
and since NASA needed rocks, something must be left. Why 
you didn’t say footprints, I’ll never know.) The end 
of the world, you always knew, would leave ghosts. 
Aliens billions of light-years away through telescopes looking, 
saying with green tongues, They were here, they were here. 

I am not at all like glass apples or other delicacies. 
I know nothing of mementos for life after it 
is gone. No lipstick on your collar, no after-sex 
afterglow. Just a tidy absence. But I must confess, 
the other day I found a ring of coffee on the mantle, 
perfect calligraphy, imperfect parenthesis, a distant moon. 
You could have found a coaster if you looked 
a little harder or asked me when I was in the kitchen. 
I let it stay. 

Nadia Arioli

is the cofounder and editor in chief of Thimble Literary Magazine. Arioli’s poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net three times and for the Pushcart Prize and can be found in Cider Press Review, The McNeese Review, Mom Egg Review, The Penn Review, Rust & Moth, and elsewhere. Essays have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize and can be found in Heavy Feather Review, Hunger Mountain Review, SOFTBLOW Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Artwork has appeared in Kissing Dynamite, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, Permafrost Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Poetry Northwest, and Rogue Agent Journal. Arioli’s forthcoming collections are with Dancing Girl Press and Fernwood Press.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Interview with Poet Nadia Arioli by Constance Brewer in Gyroscope Review (6 September 2023), in which Arioli discusses her book Be Still: Poems for Kay Sage, based on Sage’s Surrealist paintings