She would have liked to birth
‍
Her own religion introspected She worming
Her fists
‍
& arms into Her cardigan the one
with pockets & a roar of a tear in the back as if She’d
gotten fanged snaking
‍
under a barbed wire gate
These are the ruins that ruined us & so: She finds Herself
at the foot of yet another
ancient travesty of a sac-
‍
red frescoed building
in the after-
noon light peculiar to such moldy holy grottos
there’re rooms reserved for prayer & candle alone
the barefoot knocked-
‍
up mother of a sacrifice therefore exquisite
in her
dust; it was cheese & bread & oil after
sheep blotting the hill
How will the apocalypse
smell? : Ironic blast of pop-corn
‍
accord quickly met by...iris & gunpowder
...subdued ending...sandalwood Christ
who wouldn’t overreact
at the not last but second to last second just
before & perhaps
kiss the nearest
stranger tongue reading future?

‍
‍
(La Fin Du Monde is the name of a perfume; poem quotes description of the scent,
italicized; the phrase “these are the ruins that ruined us”—source unknown)

A Cabrera's poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in The New Guard, Brain,Child Magazine, Colere, Acentos Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, Best Travelers' Tales 2021 Anthology, Mer, Deronda, and other journals. Her short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Award and adapted for stage by the Bay Area Word for Word Theater Company. She writes, teaches, dances and ride bikes in San Francisco, but not always in that order.

LGBTQ+ writer, NEA Fellow and former Key West Poet Laureate, Flower Conroy’s first full-length manuscript, “Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder” was chosen as the winner of the Stevens Manuscript Competition; her second collection, "A Sentimental Hairpin" is forthcoming from Tolsun Books. Her poetry will or has appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review and others.