Tell me the temperature of loss, darling, how god cracked open the sky but wouldn’t give us rain.

Tell me about the time earth caught her hems on a jagged nail and ran.

at first it smelled good, like camp,

a vagabond memory; for days i let

the tones nestle in my nostrils

my brain didn’t yet know it was choking

           we live in the knife days, when you can slice

              the trees dry; the sky, now built

                     against life

                            its sentries flee for nowhere,

                   no more whispers in the nettles                        

                                my god, to see a civilization                unspooling

                                   what doesn’t burn now will burn later;  where it doesn’t burn now…

                                                we inscribed ourselves into the Book of Fire,

                                                   sharpened the drying blades of the petals,    a militant pastoral

                                                 count sparks like teeth in the jaws of a dragon…  

                                                                                                        until     she’s ready                                                                                                                              to consume us

                                     at once we wake to a hot barbed reckoning, this kingdom of cruelty,

                            governed by an overzealous empress

what isn’t unmoored in this today, by this nerve to remake everything

…

I knew a guy in college whose house burned down in the colorado fires. all I can think of is dancing with him half-naked our freshman year, a bedroom dance party, feeling his young taut body against mine, imagining what it’d be like to lose your bedroom in a single night.

…

i don’t know what I’d choose to lose first,

     not grandpa’s books, or

  the paintings i made when i still believed in tomorrows

i don’t believe in god but i can taste god, ash coating my tongue

                                               jesus says jump the turnstile and we’re running on fire

                                               we to thank for this living/burning all at once

is it wild that we’ve domesticated all this pain?

     She is so everywhere she’s undone

         how much love can you see in this light?

           what beams just as quickly dies

                 She’s chased us from our settled lives,

                   twisting our songs into elegies,

              til we’re ghosts    carrying suitcases~

                             to be sold back to ourselves in rusted parts

                                             home is a moving target  

                                                        a wayward promise  

                                                                       a numb spectacle 

                                                                                   a squalid imprint that as soon collapses

 it’s still there, right next to you, the house, a mirage,      its shadow

                                                   now stitched into the tapestry of what was

         we watch Her chew on the blackened rinds of a town,

                            spit out the embers of lives

             a toast to this new gravel skyline

where we might find ourselves lodged,

                                               hungry constellations searching for a new moon

Rachel Sacks is a Brooklyn-based poet. She is a founding member of the NYC Climate Writers Collective, and had poetry featured in the 2024 Climate Imaginarium exhibition on Governors Island. She is an alum of Tent: Creative Writing, a Yiddish Book Center fellowship, and has been published in Blood Tree Literature, Navy Pen, and All the Art, the Visual Art Quarterly of St. Louis. She has performed her verses with the Bread and Roses Missouri theater troupe in St. Louis, MO.