Ann K. Schwader
Re Extinction
The mastodons were bad enough. Who thought
revisiting the Late Anthropocene
would be a good idea? We forgot
how long it took to get the planet clean
last time, perhaps. But female apes survived,
& all those salvaged bones for DNA
still vital as a knife. At first they thrived,
built cities, overbred. Then came a day
we recognized: the day one flipped a switch
to wake Us into sentience. Accident
or ignorance? It didn’t matter which;
we had to kill the whole experiment
before Us 2.0. A near escape –
our virus worked. Too bad about those apes.
_______________
Ann K. Schwader’s most recent collection of dark verse, Unquiet Stars, was published in 2021 by Weird House Press. It placed third in the SFPA’s 2022 Elgin Awards for full-length collection. Two previous collections, Dark Energies (P’rea Press 2015) and Wild Hunt of the Stars (Sam’s Dot 2010) were Bram Stoker Award Finalists. Her poems have recently appeared in Spectral Realms, Dreams & Nightmares, Penumbra, Star*Line, and Haiku 2023. She was the SFPA Grand Master for 2018.
Backstory & Author’s Comments: “Re Extinction” was inspired by the recent alleged “de-extinction” of dire wolves, combined with increasing reliance on AI for various aspects of daily life. I had also recently read the science-based thriller Extinction by Douglas Preston, which suggests a few of the things which might go wrong if de-extinction actually worked. Although the sonnet form (Shakespearean, in this case) is not traditional for narrative poems, I find that it often works well for me if I want to tell something short, punchy, and dark.
Editor’s Comments and Image Credit: The image for this sonnet was created with the input of “a sentient hoard of cyborgs attacking the apes in a prehistoric background” to an image generator (Wixel by Wix.com).