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2023 Academy of American Poets Prize

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Lemming Crown

by ethan s. evans
 

The lemmings supposedly committing mass suicide by leaping into the ocean were actually thrown off a cliff by the Disney filmmakers. - Riley Woodford (“Lemming Suicide Myth: Disney Film Faked Bogus Behavior,” Alaska Fish and Wildlife News, 2003) sharing a needle with you as the sun blows the kitchen cabinets open, inches across linoleum, a palmful of steam lifting off formica. the bedroll unrolls like a blanket stolen from a sanatorium as i take sarah’s hand. and these the real pangs of love: carrying batteries out of the fallout shelter, trading drugs for better drugs, cashing our investments to vacation at the beach where the dying go. a crew of men in knit parkas toss lemmings into a river. lemmings wrangled by inuit children for a quarter a head, lemmings forced to run as snowy asbestos falls in a veil over their beady eyes, as lemmings tumble down earthen berms. a cinematographer feeds 16mm film into the flame of my lighter as methane leaks off the tundra. lemmings are falling out of the tundra, out of tussocked sedge and lupine. through the film reel i make a fist so the vein bulges across river ice. against the teeth-pocked belt. heaved a lemming through jim’s windshield and took the money from his glovebox. scored again outside the gas station where it looked like the rapture already happened and watched the breeze ferry shopping bags across the lake. think hard enough and most things seem like a parable for extinction: starlings flocking in the parking garage, jehovah’s witnesses pamphleting the free clinic, knotweed coming up through pavement. sarah, after the world there’s only the world. daisies flowering in the underpass hum as tankers ride over us. sarah, let’s build us a farmhouse by the coast. we’ll skin rabbits and take drugs with impunity, branches bent with nectarines over the daisied cliff. we’ll feed lambsquarter to wild dogs as our many christ-like children spear trout out of mountain streams. the bees are always coming through our open window, leaving a glaze of honey on

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