Apocalypse Remedies
You are prepared but
there are so many ways to spell disaster: a bird
flying straight
through windexed-clear glass in a shower
of feathers & shards the way leaves curl up in lung-heavy heat. The taste
of ash in a Hi-C colored sky. A call
sent straight to voicemail. You will want a remedy
for this. Imagine the end as a broken air conditioner
in August no breeze in sight. You might put up an advice booth
to try & answer your own questions. Let others wander in
for five cents & a good story. Ten cents for a tarot
reading, even though you don’t need cards to know what’s coming
next. Listen, you’ll say, you don’t want to stick around for an average
disaster: the for sale sign on your childhood home or the mailbox
full with only junk mail & bills. It’s time to go underground, sewer yourself
into the soil, come up clean in worms’ mouths, gasping
& wriggling, ready for gritty rebirth.
Amy Bishop-Wycisk graduated from SUNY Geneseo in 2015 and was a co-managing editor of Gandy Dancer the same year. She now works at Trellis Literary Management as a literary agent in NYC, representing bestselling and award-winning authors in fiction and nonfiction. She believes that working on GD helped prepare her for the longform slush pile and how to quickly and efficiently evaluate work.