Jacob J Billingsley

Engineered Futures

In the time I’d forsake to come for them,
I could have bound myself up at home.
There’s little left outside of this door.

And time’s own game is to erase them,
help you shake the dust from your sleeve:
the slough inching over the horizon,

our molts blown like dust in a storm.
I have turned over love again, and again,
a famous paradox. Our bare horizons

seek to be nothing but a membrane,
a collection of membranes, easy to pierce.
I am disentangling the integument

of a chicken egg, its development
artificially suspended. I am trying to admit
by enactment a fleeting pledge toward

sobriety. It is New Year’s Eve. What purpose
can recombine these like elements? Fresh
bolts sucking into the wood like worms.

Dear animal, let me be termite and friend
to you. Let’s be lovers, not loners, no more.
Let me empty my mineral body in yours; we

should emerge once more stunned by our wholeness.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jacob J Billingsley lives and works outside St. Louis with his partner and a cat. He holds a B.A. in English with an emphasis in creative writing from the University of Missouri. You can find previous work in Viridian Door, ANMLY, Empty Room Radio, EcoTheo Review and Alocasia. His poem, “The Felled,” was featured on Verse Daily in May 2025.