Unseen mineral-clouded water drips
from travertine to silt, a moment’s impact, decades’ unveil
lost archipelagos across the cavern’s ground.
There the last catamount’s mark brims without our witness.
Above, before, all was inland sea.
You can’t subsist on alone stone,
stones can’t subsist on you.
Outside, moths dim on yucca flowers.
Stars fracture in the live oaks canopy.
When did last things begin? Which last was first?
What if the dead have nothing to say to us
that they haven’t already been saying?
Wherever eyes fall on stars, someone ends
up under their influence.
One theory insists we came up from stones—
a b i o g e n e s i s . . .
Tuck a pebble in your cheek,
that’s ancient intimacy beside your tongue.
What was it Pasolini put after the skull?
SILENCE,
joyful or otherwise.
The moths ignore the security
light, tending the final bloom:
handmaidens of change,
ghosts of futuredying flowers.
C. Rees (they/them) is a nonbinary poet, educator, and bookseller whose work contends with contamination and complicity, emergent ecologies, hauntings, and porousness. They were raised in Pennsylvania (Lënapehòkink) and currently live on Coahuiltecan, Comanche, Jumanos, Lipan Apache, Sana, and Tonkawa land, what is now Austin, TX. C. holds an MFA in Poetry from the New Writers Project. Their first full-length collection of poems, NOCTUARY, is forthcoming in September 2026 from Host Publications. They are ideologically and materially committed to a free Palestine. WEB
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