"The End of the World" by Azihan Yusoff (Getty Images)
by Rhen Kent-Jaynes
Winner: 2023 Poetry Award
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In college my friends had “apocalypse parties,”
nights of consuming rations left to one of us by a paranoid prepper aunt who died of cancer. Instant macaroni and cheap vodka, mostly. A few summers back a girl I knew attended a camp to practice survival in the Olympic rainforest. One holiday weekend I drove to the mouth of the Mississippi River. There’s a town called Venice known as “The End of the World,” but I could only reach the outskirts by car; the road was submerged in brackish tide. I turned back toward New Orleans. Later it came up when I got tired of the same eyes every day and started asking new questions, like, “How far have you ever been from home?” |
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Rhen Kent-Jaynes (she/her) was an essential worker early in the pandemic and now works for a labor union. Her work has been featured in Oroboro, Angel City Review, and COAST|noCOAST. She lives in Seattle. Twitter @rkjaynes
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