Sarah Barber

How to Talk About the End of the Universe

After the end of the world, iron—
and for once not as age
or man or maiden, without will
for throne or fist, without works
like lantern or skillet, horse or key—

after the end of iron-wood
and iron-grass and iron-stone—

after all history directed
with one constant forward motion
into the future as a cold dark star—

iron unimaginably
massive, degenerate, compact.

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Sarah Barber is author of Country House, winner of the 2017 Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry, and The Kissing Party, published in 2010 by the National Poetry Review Press. Her poems appear widely and she teaches at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY.