Dan Pekker

Dan Pekker is a poet and medical student whose work explores the intersections of climate, grief, and change. Raised in California, he draws inspiration from wilderness, geological time, pathology, and the North Jersey poetry community. His debut chapbook, Love in the Time of Whalefall, was hand-published in November 2025. @dansdumbartstuff on instagram.

apocanoia: or how i learned to stop worrying and love the axe

i resist the sea’s call

so it rises to meet me

lately, i’ve felt a dawning suspicion

a fluorescent sign flickering on

that i’ve been paranoid my whole life

and just hid it from myself

in retrospect, it all makes perfect sense

14 years old at 1:30am i would slip out the front door

parents and sheepdog lulled by the highway’s hum

and stand rooted in the middle of empty street

the suburbs were deadly silent

if not for the 101 on the other side of the wall

my unblinking stared up at the sky as if it were the sun

opaque with pollution of a billion lightbulbs

and I knew this was the end

all these years later, the galaxy of microplastics

swimming in my cellphone-cooked brain

sees the frantic sticky notes on the wall:

the only one out to get me — is me

my scrambled Taurus mind is an ox

yoked to a certainty that my dad was right

when, on the worst day of my life yet

he reassured me that “worse things

will come”

black planes are circling manhattan

and i’m a semi-stump itching with what crawls

beneath my rotting bark

my roots curve inward to autumn

if the nukes hit and i’m not in love

i will die furious

my shadow flashed onto the wall

tearing at its hair

i resist the sea’s call

so it rises to meet me