for Shon C. Bury

The city of bicycles is noisy with the endless shifting of gears. Cedar finds work as a subproducer in one of Velo’s famed power plants. It’s hard, brutal work, six hours of pedaling a day, spinning the great dynamos that power the city. Her legs go from jelly to dough to wet cement. She dreams of cogs turning, the whirr of tires, wakes churning the covers.

She’s biking home one summer day — every muscle screaming at her — when she gets swept up in a peloton heading downriver.

“Where we going?” she asks the woman next to her, an angular greyhound with the massive calves of a native.

The woman laughs. “You must be new! Go? Why, we’re not going anywhere!” Before she can say any more, the peloton splits to go around a berm and when it flows back together she’s nowhere in sight. They race through the city, pulling other riders into their orbit. At sunset they descend on the Green, and drink rum and white wine and run riot, twenty thousand teeming cyclists let loose from the solemn gravity of pedal, chain, derailleur.