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 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.