it is the hottest month on record

in all of human history

 

so of course i am thinking about your ass

how flawless it looks in skinny jeans

 

your collarbone & everything

our chapsticked mouths could accomplish

 

i watch CNN footage of regurgitating smokestacks

read the latest stats on each new way we’ll annihilate

 

ourselves & know i must be human

because of the way i want

 

organic avocados imported from Mexico or

girls like you to swipe right on my curated crop top photos

 

so i invite you to a poetry reading across town

watch you watch the sun burn

 

through the bookstore window & on the train ride home

you tell me about wildfires ravaging your hometown

 

a boy who waits for you

eight states away

 

& i care about California

its three degrees of temperature rise

 

but it’s not why i lay naked

at three in the morning

 

sweating sleepless

in an air-conditioned room

 

though what do i know of the word unprecedented

what of loss labeled irreversible

 

outside my father mourns his lettuce plants

which drowned yesterday

 

when a month’s worth of rain

fell in an hour

 

first the swallows migrated too early

then the drought the size of Europe but

 

most days it doesn’t feel that hot

most days it feels like any other heat wave because

 

most days i don’t feel that hot

no VSCO sex doll Insta-baddie porn star

 

you are not the whole world,

my sister scolds me on the porch so

 

i guess your tongue in someone else’s mouth

doesn’t spell natural disaster

 

your goodbye two stops before mine

doesn’t equal species extinction

 

it is the hottest month on record

in all of human history &

 

i am not

the world

 

still i offer myself

to what can’t love me back

 

gasp when i go up in flames