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If the World Is Ending, Why Pretend?
The day the bees died we stopped lying.
I held your breath in my hands, brittle
as tiger-striped bodies beneath bare feet.
Teetering on toe-tops, we kissed amid corpses.
You slipped banded cadavers into pockets,
each husk-crunch our stolen moment.
We greeted the world’s end helium-high,
swollen lips stretched vinyl—smiling.
Megan Cartwright (she/her) is an Australian author and literature teacher. Her poetry has featured in publications including Contemporary Verse 2, Cordite Poetry Review, and Island Magazine. She was the 2024 recipient of Deakin University’s Matthew Rocca Poetry Prize and is the winner of the 2025 Tina Kane Emergent Writer Award.
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