ISSUE: Summer 2020
What happened to the city that made us
promises, promises we had the luxury
to believe or not?
Night caved its streets,
collapsed its buildings,
and crushed its ten million screens.
And, now, from the crushed screens
the flat,
translucent images
extrude themselves, escape, and flow, flat,
over the rubble…
flat images desperate to become round,
flailing across the river from one dimension
to the next—
brutalized children, drowned fathers, drowning
in the river and then in
the eye and then in the mind—
flat images stealing quietly
over the rubble,
flowing under the cracked sills and over
the broken stairs
and into the city’s caved beds
to wrap around the sleepers like
cellophane,
wrapping the complicated sleepers in
simple suffering, the sleepers
huddling in their dreams,
muffled by their longings, their ears
muffled, while mobs with torches
rage on the rubble.
