ISSUE III
MJ Gomez
AUBADE
This is how we want it to end: a meteor headed straight for us. A period
larger than all the love poems left in me. Like dawn, we sing—certain
this is how we will be remembered: your name in suspended animation.
Your name an ember headed home. Have we not prayed to be extinguished
among the dry fields, to be lifted to a heaven we cannot hurt?
The end approaches, decisive like a wound we think we deserve.
O, how we live like a wildfire. How we wish to be rain
instead. The Sun swallows all our wrongs only to spit them out,
& perhaps forgiveness isn’t a pair of wings, but the flame
that sears them away. This time, we do not need
a lifetime to reach the heaven we make for ourselves. This time,
the fire embraces all creation & the Lord watches
as we pretend to be His angels—our six wings of mud miraculous
& wrong, our lips empty as divinity—& I’m saying it’s okay.
That the world burns even without our breathing.
Emptiness moves so slowly we mistake it for forever. I’m saying
I’m not sorry for making the world end, but won’t you come
& hold me anyway?
MJ Gomez is a Filipino poet. The author of Love Letters from a Burning Planet (Variant Literature, 2023), his poems appear in Surging Tide, the Lunar Journal, Lavender Bones Magazine, and elsewhere. Find him on Twitter @bluejayverses