The prompts today are “bar” and “The Last _______.” Yesterday, I was mulling what the lore of these days might be, and the word Apocalypticon floated through my brain. It turns out there’s already a book by that name, but I thought it might be a good name for a poem.

The Apocalypticon: The Last Revelation
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

One
That spring, Grace found her first morel
on the west-facing slope of the ridge.
Everyone was finding them, actually,
that spring. Everyone was eating morels,
and Emily planted a gangster garden.
Bootleggers and mob bosses graced
her green. All we had seen before
was somehow new now, more verdant.

Two
One of us began receiving messages
from a golden koi who circled slowly
beneath the lilies of a lake. She would not
tell us what the Lady told her, only:
“Take what you need. Too much is at stake.”

Three
I did battle with poison ivy that spring,
apologizing a hundred times a day
for cutting her thousand arms, but
ivy laughed in crimson leaves and
grew like the Revolution was at hand.

Four
Some of us sat with our demons,
telling old tales of battles long gone,
bellying up to the bar of lost memories,
or singing them to sleep with old songs,
while Clare chanted exorcisms
in the sleet on windy mountains
pushing back the forces that threaten
to submerge the story. I know
of two who nearly lost the trail,
wandering far into the shadows.

Five
We stopped using the word normal,
re-wove older linguistic threads, spun
ancient stories into the chapters
we were writing. We re-worded our
vocabularies, re-ordered our syntax,
re-discovered voices we thought
had forgotten how to speak.

Six
We caught our own flocks of wild yeast,
planted potatoes in neat rows,
learned new words for magic and
for prayer, exploring layer after layer
of mysteries, parting the curtains,
and watching the ways of the moon.