by Sarah Fitzpatrick
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AI-generated gif by NightCafé for The New Verse News. |
8:47 a.m., the world is a siren. The train folds down its newspapers in unison. A thousand dominos clack to impossible silence. Playbills flutter into ash. Billboards tie themselves into prayer flags screaming past a capsule sealed against the miasma of falling towers. A new infant surfaces to gasp blue light. Mother’s breasts engorge with the fair-weather clouds beyond the cesarean drape. Someone is screaming down the hall. The willows of Central Park shudder the sign language of calamity. The molten core of Earth constricts. The trees understand it as music.
Saved by a teacher conference, your feet give way. You’ve stayed an enormous golden pendulum, its wire dusted with powdered glass. Enraged muscles conspire to squeeze until your tender hand is empty of blood. It runs to colorize the sidewalks of a ghastly silent movie screened only in Manhattan. The city as monolith, a scientist’s constant. The pendulum is a false prophet. You become the fixed point. Transfuse time back into the veins of every paramedic, every finance worker, every new mother, every suicide bomber. Steal back all that is magnetized by the core. Give back the seasons to the trees.
Sara Fitzpatrick works in animal welfare in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her poetry and fiction have been published in places like Merion West, Jet Fuel Review, X-R-A-Y, and Tampa Review. A collection, Bury me in the Sky, was published in 2020 by Nixes Mate Books.
