These, remedial gestures: how
a spinning bulk of garbage in 
the sea becomes a Holy Vortex 
for a plastic bag’s vagrancy,

how landfill picking transforms 
for garden-artists: pluck, prune, 
and glean like your foraging 
treasure on behalf of trash,

How after nuclear disaster, 
mushrooms grow on reactor walls, 
harnessing radiation like purple 
alliums photosynthesize light, 

happy globes bursting, these 
flowers can nurture budding 
stars in climates on the drier side, 
drought-tolerant, they'll keep alive.

I read once, that there's a kind 
of love that doesn't extend itself
both ways between two people 
equally because it doesn't have to.

When air explodes hot and buoyant, 
it bubbles and expands, waltzes with 
open legs and a rising skirt, condensing 
debris, sucking energy from decay.

What's left at the end of the world, 
besides lichen, missile clouds blocking 
the sun, and a harvest for two that 
can only be tilled by one?

Author’s note: The fifth stanza references the end of Carl Phillip’s poem “If You Go Away” 
and the title is inspired by Anna Yang’s The Mushroom at the End of the World.