This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from Love Letters from a Burning Planet by MJ Gomez (Variant Lit 2023).
Aubade
This is how we want it to end: a meteor headed straight for us. A period
larger than all the love poems left in me. Like dawn, we sing, certain—
This is how we will be remembered: your name in suspended animation.
Your name an ember headed home. Have we not prayed to be extinguished
among the dry fields, to be lifted to a heaven we cannot hurt?
The end approaches, decisive like a wound we think we deserve.
O, how we live like a wildfire. How we wish to be rain
instead. The Sun swallows all our wrongs only to spit them out,
and perhaps forgiveness isn’t a pair of wings, but the flame
that sears them away. This time, we do not need
a lifetime to reach the heaven we make for ourselves. This time,
the fire embraces all creation and the Lord watches
as we pretend to be His angels—our six wings of mud miraculous
and wrong, our lips empty as divinity—and I’m saying it’s okay.
That the world burns even without our breathing.
Emptiness moves so slowly we mistake it for forever. I’m saying
I’m not sorry for making the world end, but won’t you come
and hold me anyway?
MJ Gomez is the author of Love Letters from a Burning Planet (Variant Literature, 2023). His poems are featured in Frontier Poetry, the Dawn Review, Shō Poetry Journal, and others. 
Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, and Editor-in-Chief at beestung. They are an editor on the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.
