Anthropocene

We can make a home here. In these ruins. In this shattered civilization full of walking autopsies where every twinkle in the night sky is an Elon Musk satellite. Life can still thrive here. Even in the Anthropocene. Even in the middle of secular armageddon. There is still moss in the cracks of the parking lot. There are still pigeons roosting in the rafters. We can make a nest here, too, out of the plastics and the packaging, out of the shell casings and the trillions of chicken bones. We can rake it into a pile and lay listening to the ghosts of the extinct megafauna and get haunted by the spirits of the forests that used to be. It is good to breathe deeply of the fumes of this wasteland. The air still crackles with strange and crooked sorcery. The earth is still packed full of winking Buddhas inside winking Buddhas. He wears a hazmat suit these days (he's not an idiot), but you can still see him winking in the iridescent petrol puddles, and in the shopping cart saints on the wounded sidewalks, and even in the shark-eyed stare of the war pundits on Fox News. Did you know they've discovered a type of fungus in Chernobyl which feeds on the radiation there? When I first learned this I fell to my knees and wept tears of wonder and joy. The water poured from my seaweed head and washed cigarette butts down the gutter. We are swimming in an ocean of miracles. We are living on a giant cocoon. We have barely begun to scratch the surface of this world. Every moment is a leap into the great Unknown. I kneel before the black mold in Chernobyl. An angel egg is beginning to hatch. _______________ Reading by Tim Foley.