A season of plague has come to the city and everyone who can has left for the hills and the seaside, hoping a change in air will protect them, hoping their money will serve as enough of a prophylactic.

The rest of us cling to our homes, windows sealed, doors locked, blinds closed, and drown out the roaring of the corpse fires with impromptu concerts, middling voices and terrible raised over an amateur piano or radios tuned so high the speakers crack. Shadows of beasts pass over our blinds at dawn, at noon, at twilight, and we shudder and pray for deliverance.

Fever slips past somehow, and a house cracks open, families scattering through the streets, scratching desperately at locked doors, silent windows, looking for purchase, any purchase, out of the wind, out of the smoke. The beasts catch the unlucky few still out, and in our caves we sing that much louder, waiting for the season to turn.

We who survive must carry you forward through time, bear your name’s weight against a forgetful gravity.

We have seen you dying, seen you dead; gasping like a fish upon a stranger bed, collapsed among a welter of furniture. We have pruned and pruned again the accumulation of years, cast away the houses and the art, the cities and the water, until nothing remains but life and voice, and then seen those cast away as well.

And still, for one more mile, one more day–

Blood-stained hands and tobaccoed beard. Avacado carpets and smoke-filled libraries. A familiar hill and a moment’s weakness. We have grown adept at mourning, worn the elbows of our blackest suits white with toasting the lamented dead. Smelt and conversation; a high school class grown smaller year by year.

A punchline somehow finished. We, like you, will die alone, and others bear our weight.

a story for Oakland

Sharp teeth of ships afloat in the harbor. We are long-legged gods come to earth, to pile Ossa upon Pelion, to dispose as we have always done. A spider’s thread above a fire. Jeremiah, speak close, and listen: in the wailing of our joints, hear the owls crying still for Edom.

Long our bones and mighty. We are content to stand and watch, but one day we shall stir ourselves to graceful swaying life. Ezekiel weeps in the dust, sores running down his side, choked on heavy bread; we shall lift our heads and behold. Widows and orphans.

And thus skyward: all of heaven captured and held in our towers. Our hairs strung between buildings, our capillaries threaded through the roofed-over earth. In the tunnels the ocean wash of our unsettled blood. Osiris, pent in his coffins, member sunk deep in the sea. Amphitryon’s second son.

Kings of pigeons, queens of gulls, duchies of rats. An empire of busy decay. We do not sit in state in our brother court, but respect his plenipotent might. Three lots were cast, for sea, for sky, for earth, and we have all come to earth. Sharp the teeth afloat in the harbor, and cracked the skull of the sky; we are long-legged and mighty. Know our works, and despair of our glory.