The Goddess of All Endings rode to town
astride a stalwart donkey
we embraced her abject steed 
branch slim, garlanded with finger bones 

We bowed our heads at their ossified feet
laid flowers, bullets, supplications

Preserve us through the end of days
allow us perfect perambulations
until our hours trickle away

She who is our emaciated goddess 
hungrily consumes all life 
at the ending of the world
but if she bestows one ounce
of benediction, gives equal attention
unlike society’s uncaring eye for we 
who fish for opportunities to survive

We will worship our harsh queen
as we wade through life toward death

We bend low, pour molten sunflower heat
rich blood and fervent desire
we trust your skeletal hands to hold us
assure mortality and ascension
no laws, no despair, no repercussions
until the day you call us home

Then we will, your docile children,
follow you as you ride from life

[Colleen Anderson is an award-winning author with fiction and poetry widely published in seven countries in such venues as Andromeda Spaceways, Lucent Dreaming, the award-winning Shadow Atlas, and Water: Sirens, Selkies & Sea Monsters. Her Rhysling winning poem “Machine (r)Evolution” is in Tenebrous Press’s Brave New Weird. Colleen lives in Vancouver, BC, and is a Ladies of Horror Fiction, Canada Council, and BC Arts Council grant recipient for writing. Her poetry collections The Lore of Inscrutable Dreams and I Dreamed a World, and fiction collection, A Body of Work, are available online.]