Epidemic of Less
It was contagious, our unproduction.
Before we even stopped our minting
of our pennies, we disregarded dimes.
Then we gave up money altogether,
then time, then the names of animals.
We didn’t look at any flying thing
and think bird, or gnat, or honeybee.
When we left our husbands, wives,
all our pets and mail and children,
we thought cloud. We could touch
what we lost and watch our hands
go through. We thought phantom,
helium, anything unfirm. Anything
that wouldn’t, couldn’t stick around.
We fell down in the blades of brown
because it felt absurd to water lawns.
We moved out of our homes in droves.
We threw off the ecological balance,
then threw off our clothes, which grew
mold till our collective sickness ebbed.
Then we made it all, again, our own.
*
Thomas Mixon is a fiction reader for Short Story, Long. He has poems and prose in Pithead Chapel, Rattle, Eye to the Telescope, and elsewhere. He sometimes writes at inanorchardsoftwithrot.substack.com.
