after Kim Addonizio
In the fern room damp teal plants grow,
having outlasted even the dinosaurs.
Their spores wait beneath the buildings,
and burst at times from highway medians.
I want to drift through you
like a river through the landscape
of the city’s prehistory.
Yet to be so near is terrifying:
Always something with teeth
approaching. The earth’s core,
still cooling, threatening to bubble up
and dash all the proto-progress.
The sense of an impending, fiery end.
The momentum of things
that come and go, disappear forever
& take with them
an entire age. The only remains
what you hardly noticed at the start,
drenched & dripping & green.
Stefania Gomez is a queer writer, audio maker, and teaching artist from Chicago's South Side. She received her BA from Brown in 2017, and has work in The Offing, the Missouri Review, and Sinking City Review. She is the author of the chapbook ONCE I LOVED A COWBOY (Ghost City Press, 2019) and was nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. She works at the Poetry Foundation.