Duplex for the Anthropocene

By Jessica Gigot

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Roast the last tomatoes, sugar after burn tastes sweet.
Hustle to harvest all that remains of summer.

            Hurry! What will remain has always been up to us.
            Leaves, red, yellow, orange show beauty in death.

To die beautifully is to leave red and never yellow. Orange
is extinction, a word to use sparingly, like love.

            Love what we can spare from extinction.
            Dark mornings allow for deep contemplation.

Deep mourning doesn’t have to be dark if you allow 	
loss. Let the first light through the blinds.

            Blinded, let’s not take these losses lightly. 
            Wind blows fallen leaves over the neighbor’s fence.
	 
Neighbor, don’t leave while we weather these blows, this fall.
Roast the last tomatoes, sugar after burn tastes sweet.

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Jessica Gigot lives on a little sheep farm in the Skagit Valley. Her second book of poems, Feeding Hour (Wandering Aengus Press, 2020) was a finalist for the 2021 WA State Book Award. Jessica’s writing and reviews appear in several publications, such as Orion, The New York Times, and Poetry Northwest. Her award-winning memoir, A Little Bit of Land, was published by Oregon State University Press in September 2022.

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• 9/12 / Poetry Reading in partnership with Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS), celebrating its 20th year, with visiting poet-in-residence Jordan Pérez + SWWIM’s own Alexandra Lytton Regalado / Conversation moderated by Letras Latinas’s Laura Villareal to immediately follow / The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7:00 pm EST / Free

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