How to Be Cut Off From Civilization

to be honest, I forgot the plan. the man next to me on the plane 
flicks through six issues of Guns & Ammo and his watch
winks light across the aisle. I can’t help but think about the end
of the world. the moment I will finally learn to survive or die—
what glossy advice will the men give me. what smart seeds will I plant
in the hungry earth. I am not sure how to live when the sky burns
black but I do know how to be alone. to stack bricks from an empty 
factory next to the train tracks. to kick stones into the arroyo, the
thirsty dust of the highway-side wash. my friend has a gun in her closet
and I think about it often. out of reach but still hidden in the folds
of out of season dresses. wrapped in a torn shoebox. anyway, I think
I could live at the foot of a butte—in the shadow of something carved
by the wind. imagine how far I could see across the desert. imagine 
how big it would echo—all the nothing left after the flood.

Sara Ryan is the author of I Thought There Would Be More Wolves (University of Alaska Press), as well as the chapbooks Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned (Porkbelly Press) and Excellent Evidence of Human Activity (The Cupboard Pamphlet). In 2018, she won Grist's Pro Forma Contest and Cutbank's Big Sky, Small Prose Contest. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Brevity, Kenyon Review, Diode, Thrush Poetry Journal and others. She is a PhD candidate at Texas Tech University.