This most recent apocalypse
Jason R. Montgomery
My auntie is prepping for this most recent apocalypse.
Laughing, she references the Russian president in the same sentence
as Serra, Burnett, and Cortés.
Just another in a long list of apocalypse men.
She asks if my brother sent me Potassium iodide yet.
He has them left over from his thyroid.
Which was removed 15 years ago.
He told her she will need to take one a day once it all starts.
It is just one of the apocalypse instructions she’s written on pink card stock from her scrapbooking supplies in her quick and tight handwriting.
They sit by the computer she doesn’t really know how to use in her little office.
There is also one that says: “Close yahoo. Open google mail (gmail) account. Better?”
In her spare room,
the one my sons call their bedroom,
She has me assemble a wire baker’s rack
That she purchased from Costco.
Her supplies are cans of pinto beans,
powdered Ensure,
corn tortillas,
and one bottle of Chick-fil-a sauce.
Over dinner at La Fonda when I ask her for her plan
Once all the food is gone,
Or if there is no power during the summer
when the heat reaches 120 degrees.
She simply says,
with a laugh,
that I’d know from the other side of the world,
“I will live or I will die just like all the rest.”
Jason R. Montgomery, or JRM, is a Chicano of Indigenous Californian/Mexican descent writer, painter, community artist and engagement artist from El Centro, California. In 2016, along with Poet Alexandra Woolner, and illustrator Jen Wagner, JRM founded Attack Bear Press in Easthampton, MA. Jason’s work engages the cross-section of Chicano/Indigenous identity, cultural hybridization, post-colonial reconstruction, and political agency. His writing and visual art bridges the aesthetics and feel from the early cubist collage movement and the Russian abstract movement of the 1920s with living and historical Transborder Indigenous and Chicano art traditions to explore the Post-colonial narrative through active synthesis and guided (re)construction. JRM’s work has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Storm Cellar, Ilanot Review, Cosmonauts Avenue and other publications. Jason is one of 2021 Newell Flather Awards for Leadership in Public Art outstanding nominees and 2021-2023 Easthampton Poets Laureate. Jason is also the co-founder of the police abolition group “A Knee is Not Enough” (AKINE) in Easthampton, MA. They are also the founder of the annual Holyoke Community Ofrenda, the police transformation group A Knee is Not Enough (AKINE), and various public engagement projects.