Gaia,

I’ll miss your seedless fruit
and aquariums and viscous nights

lined with jazz and frostbite
and funeral pyres that sent off

children I don’t remember
being me. I envy the sky’s role—not

for light, for inspiration. Paint me
with Jupiter’s colors and

Mercury’s stoicism and my
father’s ability to endlessly

resurface when you drag him down
in the cradle of your undertow.

I’m sorry for not being
intimate anymore. When

you give me false contractions
of easy love I want to stop

your insides from working
again. When I last breathe

your sweet, verdant neon,
remember me as overcast,

a lichen, a festering silence
that only grows sweeter in

the absence of.