What I Think About When I Think About the Future
The only chirping at dawn will come from broken smoke alarms.
Cars will possess decision-making skills most humans do not.
Zoos will resemble museums.
What will count as blessing? An envelope, a licked stamp, a folded letter in longhand.
Monochrome trees will revise their centuries of wisdom.
A blessing will be the crispness of an apple twisted from a branch. Or the shred of its
memory on your tongue.
Who will remember neon tropical fish, their sleeping habits?
Only plankton.
Not barnacles but leaves of rust will callous the flanks of sunken ships, reminding us of
autumn.
Dusk will arrive but not in swaths of gold and plum.
Crocuses will bloom in November. A dementia of seasons.
There might be a dry Ohio summer that ends on the nineteenth of February.
The seasons will shorten, lengthen, blur—each into each. Entire months, falling from
calendars.
A blessing will be the sound of sudden rain. As it was in the beginning and, with any
luck, ever shall be.
Cars will possess decision-making skills most humans do not.
Zoos will resemble museums.
What will count as blessing? An envelope, a licked stamp, a folded letter in longhand.
Monochrome trees will revise their centuries of wisdom.
A blessing will be the crispness of an apple twisted from a branch. Or the shred of its
memory on your tongue.
Who will remember neon tropical fish, their sleeping habits?
Only plankton.
Not barnacles but leaves of rust will callous the flanks of sunken ships, reminding us of
autumn.
Dusk will arrive but not in swaths of gold and plum.
Crocuses will bloom in November. A dementia of seasons.
There might be a dry Ohio summer that ends on the nineteenth of February.
The seasons will shorten, lengthen, blur—each into each. Entire months, falling from
calendars.
A blessing will be the sound of sudden rain. As it was in the beginning and, with any
luck, ever shall be.
Angela Narciso Torres is the author of What Happens Is Neither (Four Way Books), To the Bone (Sundress Publications), and Blood Orange (Willow Books). Recent work appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, Poetry Northwest, and Prairie Schooner. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and Harvard Graduate School of Education, she received First Prize in the Yeats Poetry Prize (W.B. Yeats Society of New York). Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she currently resides in San Diego. She serves as a senior and reviews editor for RHINO Poetry.