Water Shortage: 8 Brief Verses

1.

Faithful wife

Remedy disrespectfully slipped

Into her meal

2.

Eternal youth

A demon's worst weapon

Drops become flood

3.

Water

Once living

Haunts abandoned fields

Unable to give life

4.

Navigator success

Aligns Titanic above

Slumbering kaiju

5.

Atrocity exhibition

Of extinct lifeforms our empathy

Fails to recognize

6.

Siren silenced, burning air breathed.

Singeing birds to bone, flightless

now, stillness underground: a kingdom

of skulls filled with brains vitrified

into obsidian and thoughtless repulsion

banged out crudely on lithophones

by a minor's callused hands. Intent is laid

to rest on an assembly line prone, listless.

7.

Alone I buried one million stone

chains in the shallow topsoil

Calculating beginnings, night's tired cinders,

trapping shadows of the elderly

to stitch a mask over the sun's face

8.

Her stars knit

A shroud over Earth

Concealing our graves

* * *

These works are previously unpublished, and were composed during January 2020. I drew inspiration from the Dwarf Stars Award anthologies published by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association.