All day, the talk is lint.
Committees meet and look at their calendars.
The carpet hardly moves.
The lobby doesn’t even smell of corpses.
It’s Monday here.
There’s a salad bar here.
In Rafah, a wall is blown off by somebody’s son.
He’s gotten his life back on track now.
His father doesn’t cry outside his door anymore.
A tiny nozzle mists the lettuce.
The clock on each laptop jogs on its treadmill.
At 12:31, the meeting resumes.
No one looks at the sky anymore.
Looking has gotten risky.
Once I looked at a birthday cake
and saw a president’s face.
It was burning there
next to a piece of my cousin’s bedroom.
There were no balloons but when I looked up I saw a cloud inflating—round and swollen, dark around the edges, bleeding through with light, pulling more and more filament into her breasts, bright powdery hearts and fleshy grays folding into her, and still more, dense fast-moving bars and flat brown sheets that smothered the sun curling into her mass, until she was heaving, large, now straddling the earth, bearing down–
that day, we sang an old song
and ate cake with our hands
until we had to leave
the world we knew behind.
But there were some who stayed, gripping their keyboards
even as gales lifted the roof off their box, typing:
Fill out this meeting poll today!
You must choose between 2:05 and 2:08!
