By Madari Pendas

Shifting Baseline theory– suddenly apathy has context;
you cannot mourn what was never potted and sprouted
in your garden. Unmoored degradation.

I'd like to be a professor of apóleia,
seminars, slides, discussion posts
on our drowned mangroves, the losses

we don't know to lament. Yet.
Coral reefs, candied, colored,
fielded across roiling ocean floors.

I'll remind them of citrus, how we once ate
fruits that prepared our lips for kisses,
desired burns. Fresh fires in our mouths.

Would they believe in the Key Deer?
Cotton-tailed, timid, blithely nibbling thatch palm berries,
pine rockland flooded, fawns gasping above shorelines.

I'd recreate the butterfly orchid,
purple crepe paper, diamond cut,
twists of clay for the pistil and cotyledon.

Remember. Remember even if you weren't there.
The loss. Grouper and snapper; manatees
that fed from freshwater hoses,

backs tallied by boat blades. Imagine sleep
under the coconut palm, shadowed orbs,
threats and treats. Feel the surprise

of a Florida panther's stare behind buttonbush,
Gone. It existed. I promise, the lychee was real,
fuzzy, an eyeball shelved in tweed.

I'll see their faces. No different than mine
when I hear of Torreya trees, child of bluffs and ravines,
needled and secret.

Or the purple lantana. I only know textbook
recreations, attempts at revival, ecological
obituaries.

The Spix Macaw went extinct in the 2000s,
blue, blurry with its tousled feathers,
gray lores and eye rings.

The last confirmed sighting of the Caribbean Monk Seal
was in the 1950s. Forty-two years before I was born.
Imagine the slick pinseal, slipping through your hands,

playful, almost trusting, whiskered scratches and prods,
it's full settled weight on your legs,
neck sprouting towards the suns of your eyes.

Madari Pendas is a writer, poet, painter, and cartoonist. Her work has appeared in Craft, The Columbia Journal, The Masters Review, The Maine Review, and more. She is the author of Crossing the Hyphen (2021) and She Loves me, She Loves me Not (2025).