“Modern Love/Climate Disasters” by Becca Downs

It doesn’t usually look like this. Mountains cloaked in cloud cover, no layers of blue arches to texture the sky behind the cityscape. Wildfires rage somewhere west of here, so today we breathe thick–fog, smog, or white flags overhead and as far as we could normally see. Normally, a cartoon-perfect sky. Jagged peaks behind coffee shops and restaurants and rooftops and every other shape that makes a city. A cactus here, generous splashes of sunflower everywhere. But now, gray haze. Ghostly veil obscuring landscape. And I, a visitor, imagining the blue they say sings the sky at all other times. It’s not normally like this. Your bedroom, you mean. Clothes coat the floor like heavy snowfall, cover your bed like a tornado you slept through. I’m embarrassed, this is a mess. I didn’t expect to bring you here like this. You clear just enough space for us on your bed and we make love anyway. The next morning haze lingers over mountains, mountains of clothes still haze the carpet, mine mingle now with yours, and I want to tell you, I don’t normally do this. Sleep with someone I’m not seeing, that is. Shed myself. Mix my mess with someone else's. Linger too long. Wonder what color the sky might be this afternoon or ten years from now. Smoke sweet lovers out of their own homes.           Linger too long.

About Becca Downs
She/They

Becca is a poet, freelance writer, and MFA candidate with the Mile-High MFA program at Regis University in Denver, Colorado. Her work will be published in the upcoming anthology Take The Fruit, Flood The Desert, and has previously been published in Sorry for the Inconvenience: an Anthology of Queer and Trans Voices, Flying Island Magazine, Glass Mountain, Ecletica, Jupiter Review, Heartland Society of Women Writers, genesis, and more. She enjoys hiking, exploring new places, and finding the best donuts wherever she travels.

You can find her on Instagram at @beccad___