I Can't Stop
       

Being a person who looks for the dark side.
Looking up crime statistics at Disneyland.
Looking for monsters under the bed.
Also, I can't stop taking pictures of flowers
even though mostly we have nine months of rain.
I can't stop wondering if the hummingbirds here
are doomed, if the snow geese will be poisoned
at an abandoned copper mine lake in Montana,
if that virus will reach us before we develop a vaccine.
So, I can't stop writing the apocalypse story over and over.
I've imagined the end before I'd even begun—
I wrote a nuclear winter poem when I was seven.
There was a boy in a symbolic green raincoat.
I watch football thinking of the boys with broken bones.
I watch wars thinking about people brought home
with missing limbs, nightmares, tremors.
I can't stop thinking about the jellyfish massing
in our warming ocean coast, the orca carrying her dead calf.
When I'm in the MRI tube, I can't help but think
of all the episodes of X-Files or House where people
had seizures within the MRI tube, for unexplained reasons.
Tonight I wonder if twenty-four years of marriage
are too many. I look at the picture of me at nineteen,
my eyes still hopeful but also afraid. I wonder when
someone I love will die. I wonder how many more holidays
I will celebrate. I told you, I can't stop introducing you
to so many clouds on my horizon. I'd rather tell you
about my nonstop love of Rainier cherries
or kissing in the rain. My nonstop love of even
old arcade games, the sound of them. I can't stop
thinking of the Doomsday Clock, how close we are
to spinning out, our planet into the full blast of the sun.

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Copyright © 2021 Jeannine Hall Gailey All rights reserved
from Sugar House Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission