Lana’s sorry she can’t make it, she has to go to
Rochester for a consult about the tumors. I didn’t
know about the tumors. It turns out Wendy has them too,
pain swelling and puckering. Ezzie hasn’t tried the skirt
on yet; three times their daughter dreamed their murder, metal
to flesh behind a restaurant, outside a pharmacy. Yielding,
splitting. Sami yearns towards movement while
new fatigue, thick as asphalt in their veins, keeps them still.
Everyone I love is flesh, even when Tovah stares from vast distance
at other unknown fifth-graders in fleshless squares,
flickering digital splinters. Her father Bryan wasted himself
to splinters, left the continent. When we talk his brother’s voice bombards
the background and I yearn into our adolescence, bodies that bounced
between subway cars, infinite. I haven’t spoken to Zainab in
a decade, but I know she’s home again, where settlers snipe flesh
through midnight doorways, claim everything they crush is theirs. Everyone
I love is flesh, the kind that shatters in a bomb blast,
that breathes a virus in and crumbles, that putrefies when there’s
no room at the mobile morgue. At least four thousand one day in winter,
overflowing. Wendy sends a picture of the tumors when
they’ve been removed, bloody, clumped together like a train. Nadezhda reaches
up inside me and my flesh starbursts, nearly where
my tumors would be if I had them, fingerprints. Against aging
memory foam I breathe her, trace patterns on the flesh
of her back even though miles away a man sweeps
a semiautomatic across a phalanx of strangers, every one of them flesh,
and she doesn’t want to be awake.
