qarrtsiluni

The skyscraper across from my Times
Square hotel appears under destruction:
a sculpture in steel and glass, all angles
like an abstract colt or a weeping
woman watching her man launch
onto a sea of sky from her
salt grass baskets. Yesterday
a woman reminded me the Maya
predicted world-end at 2012.
She handed me a string of paper
to write what I would be doing
that day. I imagined
touching your faces, planting
something in earth.
I could only think of people
in our Americas
so poor they sell one another
dirt for food and of the bottle-green
Caribbean beneath the temples of Tulum.

by Katherine Durham Oldmixon

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