Aporia

Everyone in the city has been torn apart. I gingerly step around torsos dragging their viscera along the sidewalks. The women in the financial district, in blouses more beautiful than the finest fabrics available to queens a century ago, look like jellyfish: stringy red and black tendrils of intestine slither after colorful caps. They move at half the speed of the men in their midst, for each holds a purse of inventive form with one hand while the other, manicured, straining, pulls her along. They pool at corners, waiting for lights to change. I see one, exasperated, attempting to hail a cab, but she is too low to the ground, and besides: there is no traffic.

A group of working-class men have propped themselves against the wall of a bar and are smoking, but their fingers are wet with blood -theirs, others’- and they struggle to keep their cigarettes lit. They silently gesture to one another with sitcom expressions on their faces: can you believe this, they ask. Another wasted Winston.

I peer into the windows of a diner where waitresses still carry trays of food, slippery with blood, to parties of legless businessmen. In their wet booths they slide off of the vinyl seats and collapse underneath the tables, apologize to one another for these slow and sopping collisions, then clamber back up, mouths open, like dying birds begging for food from dying mothers. What they eat falls through them.

On the televisions, news networks gamely remain on the air, although anchors cannot stay above their desks. They cut to footage from some poorer part of the earth: scenes of mountains of naked torsos piling high atop one another, seemingly attracted to something buried within the crowd, wrapped in the dead just outside of the core, or perhaps to something above the mound, just out of reach unless a few more can lift themselves atop this heaving, breathing biomass and be subsumed by later waves, surely suffocating but at least in their death providing height for the rest.

I cannot ground myself. I cannot focus. I see starving children. I see weeping old men. I cannot account for their suffering. I cannot stand the sight of the streets, the camps, the dunes, the forests: full of blood, full of disintegrating life, teaming with death. I feel my legs giving way.