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turning on fans, and by closing the windows.
    How the light bent along the horizon and—
    How your factories glowed, how they moaned and blossomed. How this boy held the daughter in the dead and tufted lawn of the hillside. How they refused to believe what you built below.
    This husband of the soil, Henry, and how he pressed a pillow against the boy’s face. How beneath the pressure the boy thrashed and moaned. How the husband tried on the boy’s shirts and pants and how none of them fit, how the seams burst apart and how they dripped with soil and mucus. How the woman touched the stains and asked the boy if he had been gardening. How the man slept in the boy’s bed and how the sheets, stained with dirt, mashed moss, and worms. How the husband read The Encyclopedia of Medicine from the boy’s shelf and how all words seemed smears of ink and clotted with the images of men shaved and pale, their ribs bulged and strained against impossible skin, their open black eyes and how they lay, piled and strewn. How the husband knew well what these men had become.
    How in those days men took it upon themselves to pull on masks and light torches, how they banded together, neighborhood by neighborhood, and they boarded up and burned those infected houses .
    How the boy sat on the back porch with the daughter while the mother wailed inside the house. How this world was no longer her own. How the woman wept and took pills and drank a bottle of vodka. How she masturbated and how she screamed out the window for the boy, “This is for you!” How the dead-husband leaned over his widow, how he blew on her ear, how he caressed her neck. How she giggled and sighed while, outside, the boy held the daughter. How frail she seemed now, how red her eyes, her lips of salt and thin hair, white and blue with moonlight, her brow rested against his apron. How the dead husband dragged his wife past where they sat, the moaning fatness of a canvas sack, and how the daughter pretended not to see. How the daughter said, “She’s jus—” and how she sputtered. “I just don’t—how she can—She’s always—” How the boy said, “Someday you will do the same. But all of this,” and the boy gestured to the town around them, “will be gone by then.”
    Now the humming faces of a thousand, thousand locusts and the horizon yawned a pure whiteness. How the air vibrated and grew new colors. How cities folded into dust. How time shaped and bent and dissolved. How you stood beneath the wave of the blasts, in your exterminator outfits, your bandanas. How you watched the end of all we had ever known. Now the flash of light and how from every forest buffalo stampeded and pummeled the street into rocks, how the vibrations shattered windows. How still living buffalo were skinned and their hides dropped like trousers, steaming and burning. How buffalo stampeded, pink, and how blue smoke coiled and fumed—How the skies rained husks of trees, evergreens stripped of needles, flaring and sparking—How elevators opened and there stood bears, sizzling and frying in their own grease while marmots and squirrels scratched and yelped within serving carts. Does skittered along hallways, fat with life, and does dropped to tiled floors, moaning, smoking and sizzling, while from their split bellies pink heads emerged.
    How the vibrations smiled and heaved and swallowed eagles, black and heavy. How eagles woke, thrashing and flapping and screeching in kitchenettes. How charcoaled eagles fell from windows and broke apart on walkways while cougars and leopards, white tufts splotched with oil and soot, matted brows, hunkered on counters with steady eyes. How wild cats washed the scorch with pink tongues gone ebony. How the buildings moaned and seethed and crumbled while within, deer trampled the elderly. How legs and hooves caught in the spokes of wheelchairs and smoldering deer thrashed against tiled