Hannah is sixteen, and she sees her friends begin to change their bodies. Nature has already given them breasts and hips, periods and pubic hair. Now they metamorphose on their own terms.

Taylor walks in the first day of school with her hair cropped close to her skull. Jen’’s cheeks hollow amidst rumors that she eats only lemon wedges and chia seeds. Isabel lifts her shirt in the locker room to reveal a mildly infected rose blooming in the small of her back.

Hannah’s hair is long, her skin unpierced. Her cheeks are round with puppy fat. She eats pot roast and knishes and potato pancakes cooked by a woman whose hair was once shaved, whose bones were once visible, whose wrist still bears the number tattooed on her wrist so many years ago.

She thought she would give birth in a world
where Hawaii had been swallowed by the ocean
where bear skeletons littered Arctic seabeds
where sharks snapped in the watery remains of Miami.

She thought she would have to feed her child in a world
of plastic soil and toxic fruits
of burning rainwater, acid rivers
of garbage islands in browning seas.

She thought she would raise her child in a world
of a thousand new Atlantises
of lands without seasons
of barely-remembered snow.

Instead she gives birth in a world
where electricity still hums
where supermarkets still stand
where snow falls gently outside hospital windows.

She is too young,
the baby is too early,
but the world has not ended yet.

When we die and they cut us open they’ll find

the fat from the fries we ate
at one o clock in the morning
congealing in our spent arteries

the bass from the gay nightclub
misted with sweat and cologne
vibrating in our stiff bones

the sangria we drank like water
in our first apartment
adrift in our drying blood

the kisses from strangers
deep and feverish
imprinted on our cooling lips

everything we hoped and dreamed
in the dying days of teenagedom
painted on the caves of our skulls

the thud of fear as the thunder
chased us home from St. Laurent
echoing in the quiet chambers of our hearts.