By Lane Devers
Featured Art: “Portal” by Ana Prundaru

I will be the first to admit that I don’t understand
   how the Wi-Fi router connects us to the internet, how disease spreads,
why we can’t just print more money, abolish holiday cards. In my nightmares

all the deer in the field get sick and become hunter-deer, meaning
     they hunt us in orange vests, hold their crossbows
between their black hooves. We gallop in packs on all fours to hide in our kitchen

cabinets which they cannot quite open with their deer hands. They pry
          and pry, and we die there, frozen in place, people in headlights.
Call me dramatic, but I know that our time as predators is dwindling.

Look, we call them “Martians” even if we don’t believe in them; we put them in our cartoons.
           We give Marvin the Martian a spaceship and a gun, laugh at his attempt to explode
the earth. There are things that are too terrible to know: what might the world look like

without any water? How long does the family pet have to live?
         What would have happened if I had stayed in Detroit after the flights were grounded?
I’ve been trying to tell Becca about that impossible spring, the fever that ended things:

the day everyone threw out their ballet shoes, the headmaster telling us not to panic,
           to pack our things, be gone in twenty-four hours.
In Montana, we pretend we aren’t prey for the grizzly that brushes our tent.

In Utah ours is the first car behind the Honda that is smashed into a silver coin
         by an enormous boulder. My mother used to babysit for a family that died
like that, a freak accident. Mudslide, avalanche, alien invasion, it’s all

on the dying horizon. Marvin pushes his colorful buttons, mumbling:
           Why there was no BOOM! There was supposed to be an earth-shattering KA-BOOM!
In the casino parking lot on the way to Gerlach, the tiny town where they hold

Burning Man every year, we swerve around dozens of deer, the semi-truck behind us,
          the scream of braking, the improbability of our survival, the green light of their eyes,
like creatures from space. I know that luck won’t save the world.

When we arrive, we ignore the signs urging us not to submerge our heads
         into the blue-green hot springs full of toxins, waste.
I’ll be the first to admit I’m still angry with you. Coming down in the springs,

the easy joke: It feels like baptism, and Becca, still in the back of Sid’s truck,
          allows the group of us to nearly drown. The rage comes back in fragmented heat:
apple fritters, power outage, pulling ivy off brick. The unusually warm New Year’s Eve

when firework shrapnel falls into my lap, the red cardboard tube still smoking.
          The ring we shoplifted made from the handle of an old spoon, the blackberry thorns.
The summer you worked fighting fires in the valley and all the letters Becca received

from an ex-boyfriend coming in on the backs of pack-mule. The winter spent in the garden shed
           where Becca lived in the frat boy’s backyard. I’ll ask what everyone is thinking:
Was it worth it? Octopus tentacles spray-painted against the sides of Becca’s Toyota,

mold beneath the camping mattress, bloody teeth, night terror, minimum wage.
          I’m writing to tell Becca I can no longer be responsible for her every anxiety about this
Earth. The sun will explode, or it won’t. All this fear is getting redundant. When I am afraid

I shut my eyes and think of the Simpsons episode where Homer has a dream
          while sleeping through church: he asks God: What is the meaning of life?
And God answers, just as the closing credits start to roll. I think not of this episode,

but the next ones, when Homer goes on knowing what we can’t. He continues
           pushing colorful buttons at the nuclear power plant neither saving nor destroying
the world, perhaps because he knows this is all we get.

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Lane Devers’s poems have appeared in The Scapegoat Review, Heavy Feather Review, DREGINALD, The Offing, and elsewhere.