by Brittney Corrigan

Forget the day—how hours flatten the way rising water turns islands back to sea, how minutes tire of treading and flail their tentacled fingers above the surface, grasping at gull legs, the mired rim of a trash vortex, anything to hold on to before seconds turn blue from the effort and the whole mess siphons down—yes, forget the day, in terms of this planet—a planet that has been here 4.5 billion years—our existence but a fraction of a percent, a blip even to the dinosaurs that tromped and scrabbled themselves across the Earth’s crust one hundred and fifty-nine million years longer than we’ve been digging our toes in the sand, swinging from branches, praising the soil or stewarding the land or unrocking the mountains or replacing redwoods with skyscrapers or talking about the weather or generally fucking everything up, yes, this isn’t about the day anymore, it’s about reach out and grab that ice shelf—don’t let that big white bear and her two black-eyed cubs float away—carpe Ursus maritimus, carpe Pongo abelii—orangutans grooming their 97%-identical-to-human-genome-selves in the rainforests, please carpe the rainforests—carpe Panthera pardus orientalis, carpe Panthera tigris sondaica—big cats in their patterned fur coats, in their slink-vanishing away from us—carpe Balaenoptera musculus—whale shark circling our dreams, vesseling its way through our paintings and poems—carpe Thaumatibis gigantean, giant ibis—the world’s most endangered and evolutionarily distinct bird—carpe Adelocosa anops, Kaua’i cave wolf spider that doesn’t spin webs, that chases down its prey the way we are chasing our own tails now, digging ourselves a meteor-sized crater of a grave, exponentially expanding daily what we’ll take down with us, dragging the aurora borealis and its tundra and permafrost after us, yes, forget the day, carpe the last of the dark sky places, the quietest places on Earth, the deserts with their nocturnal rhythms—flora and fauna that know what it is to survive—yes, forget the day, carpe noctis, carpe noctis—let there be stars when we seize the last of the light.