​

Trashed

​

I study photos of the Martian landscape on my phone as a means of distracting myself from the cemetery that sprawled, naked and gaping, across the street from my motel room.

 

Our bodies, single-use and disposable, once interred, leak embalming fluid into the ground,

 

jettisoned like the spaceship parts that fall into the ocean after take-off and

 

the innumerable Diet Coke cans that wash up on the beach.

 

And so, after opening the app and paying to have my vodka delivered,

 

I track the incoming bottle on the map as if charting the trajectory of an earth-bound asteroid.

 

This has happened before:

 

The end of an era, a mass extinction of species.

 

Even so, I drink alone in my motel room, shedding skin cells and coughing out airborne illness, parts of myself, left behind like the NASA rovers that were abandoned on Mars once their batteries had been drained.