The future we want is already gone

Bronwyn Lovell

I should have watered the garden 
but I didn’t. Things that were alive 
are dead now because of me. And 
this is not the first time. I have 
enjoyed slaughtered animals in sauce—
sometimes by mistake, sometimes 
knowingly. I have let men enter me, 
usually by mistake. I feed the animals 
I keep in my house the heads and 
hearts of other animals ground down 
and baked into little cookies called 
kibble. They eat it all and beg for 
more. I cover my animal parts in cloth 
made by people in other countries 
in conditions called unlucky. I hang 
a cruelty-free Christmas pig on my 
plastic pine knowing a real tree died 
for this cardboard display. We are 
dysfunctional expressions of DNA. 
Climate scientists say we’re as good 
as dead now anyway, but greedy as 
cancer, we still gorge and grow—
exhausting everything, consuming 
even ourselves.