(after reading Joy Harjo’s Rabbit is up to Tricks with the archaeologists)

A man opens a bookstore in his garage.

Before long, it is the only bookstore in America.

He is rich.

A prophet cries from his wheelchair and the bookstore man hears the voice generating device:

It’s too late.

The garage bookstore man takes his garage bookstore money and builds a rocket.

It looks like a

cock

and he shoves it into space.

To save the earth, he says.

That same day, a thousand stoplight parrotfish have sex changes.

180 miles of reef and no one questions their pronouns.

The week before the rocket launch, a man bore witness to this:

A dozen women climbed on to a boat somewhere between

Tobacco Caye and the Smithsonian Research Station,

pulled off their fins,

and pulled a thousand pieces of plastic trash from

beneath their bathing suit tops.

The man knows that all the bookstore money in the world

could not show the parrotfish

that kind of

love.