Well done, Universe. Comes to millions and millions and millions of millennia, stereoscopic vision, bipedalism, opposable thumbs, consciousness, and finally, a thing you cannot eat. Immortality!

xxxxxxxxxxPlastic.

xxxxxxxxxxToday, the inedibles gather upon the waters. Much of my own diet too is synthetic and indigestible.

xxxxxxxxxxOnly now do we understand what our planet ever wanted: to be utterly pliant, and never to die.

***

Geoff Bouvier’s first book, Living Room, won the APR/Honickman Prize, and was published in 2005 by Copper Canyon. His second book, Glass Harmonica, appeared in 2011 from Quale Press. In 2009, he was the Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at the University of California-Berkeley. He earned an MFA from Bard College in 1997 and a PhD in poetry from Florida State in 2016.