By marion eames white

The intrusion of this type of transcendence, which I am calling Gaia, makes a major unknown, which is here to stay, exist at the heart of our lives . . . We are no longer authorized to forget her. We will have to go on answering for what we are undertaking in the face of an implacable being who is deaf to our justifications. 

— ISABELLE STENGERS trans. Andrew Goffey

opening a door for someone and—if 
my mother is to be believed— 

adding to a stack of good karma. 
not in the religious sense—no sense 

being reborn, here at the end of the world. 
i’m talking to you in the spirit of 

the anthropocapitogeocene or whatever we call 
apocalypse these days. a misanthropocene 

where everything is thermodynamics.
opening this door causes that door 

at the other end of the lobby 
to suck shut from the pressure change 

like an oversized plunger like the world is 
a toilet we only ever shit in fuck 

everyone who considers their being 
on this planet “just passing through.” 

last i checked, jittering atoms 
            stop us 

passing through the ground. 
through each other. chaos 

what keeps us here. so be 
here. don’t think about anything other than 

this. feel my forehead. my feverish 
worry. let me try again. last year 

i got lost and wound up walking on the side of a highway— 
except it wasn’t a highway. it was a six-lane boulevard 

behind the apartment where i live. all the cars going sixty,
eighty, refusing to signal, refusing to yield to 

our best possible world, blowing smoke
and small fires out of every tinted orifice. 

i opened my mouth right there 
on the side of the road. heat slapped my tongue.

i slurped it up like a thermometer.