SEBASTIAN KOGA

extinction

I took out my pen
but no words came
I tuned in tiny turns the old guitar

no song would scale its skin
its neck choked by invisible
threads of silken indecision

I walk a patch of creation
where yardmen are
sweeping trash

golden oak leaves burn in great piles
little fronds of coppered cypress
are smoking in the sun

the cremation is silent
where once we wove so carefully
the veins of Fibonacci numbers

the golden ratio of the sky
still spiraling — last words
of autumn leave an empty chord

I put away my pen
without punctuation
the phrases are broken on their own

Sebastian Koga is a Romanian neurosurgeon and medical researcher currently living in New Orleans. He holds Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford. His writing is inspired by migration, displacement, proximity to illness and death, and the rapid ecological and technological changes of the Anthropocene. His poems appear in The Vanity Papers, Oxford Literary Review, The Poet’s House, Liminal Spaces, Wingless Dreamer, Poets Choice and Cathexis Northwest Press.