New Dead Families

I release her naked out in the streets, new and alive, on fire with life and so hungry she is eating from garbage cans and stealing bones from the dogs, legs of lamb and chicken feet, and she goes and I follow her trace until she vanishes behind a building and my partner holds me back and tells me things about how she once raced around the city with no clothes on and toppled buildings with each accelerating push, vanishing, rapid and orgasmic, and now she lets me know of her plan to build a spacecraft, says she has already drawn plans and hired a team to engineer the system, destination away-from-these-fucking-limbs, she explains, but I am back at the window now, transfixed with drilling from miles away, the hammering and explosions getting nearer, and someone has doused the fire and naked men and women scatter in the distance, beautifully naked, mind you, and I realize that I, too, have forgotten my clothing somewhere, but we find a set of used velvet robes with our initials printed over the hearts and don them, holding our glasses and clinking them to the rising sun of a dead day, to the future of festering wounds and bandages, under this dripping sky, and we ascend and open the door to the roof, stand at the precipice, looking out at the fifty-four floors, each alight with people moving, people talking, people eating, people showering and people combing hair in brightly lit bedrooms and bathrooms, and from this building and other buildings bodies float across the sky through evaporating smoke tunnels like gigantic intestines, and they are growing larger, the news said, but our television was destroyed weeks ago when my partner smashed it with her fists, dissembled and rebuilt it as a weathercock which she threw from the window down onto an abandoned automobile that someone was using for shelter, and she heard screams for days after, but no one helped all those people, just took snapshots of them and the smoldering and slime-drenched city, looking left and right at the rows of buildings, streets collapsed in the distance, barren trees sprouting through concrete, growing larger, the distended stomachs, one in particular attaching itself to the building across the way with its sprouting tentacles, some flailing in the air, some exploring through broken windows, some whipping wildly around in the sky and we watch and sip, watch and clap while smoking cigarettes, pull up broken lawn chairs and stare transfixed at the spectacle and the pinkened sky above, streaks of neon pink fused with black, the pink pinker and more violent than yesterday and all the days before, and we sit and we look at that pink, feel that pink burn our skin, warm and cool our skin turning pink, but my partner’s skin appears red, and she says, round we spin, round we go, up and down, while sipping, and I frown at the thought that the mind slips wordlessly from us, but I hold it in and turn again toward the stomach, which is pumping and gulping air, perched atop the building, using it as a pedestal (the news said, there were four hundred affected areas, four thousand instances of intestines and stomachs in the city) and smoke rises from a small bonfire on the other side of the roof where someone is burning a sofa, a family of two daughters, a mother, and a father, watching, waiting for the smoke to form a tunnel, watch it waiting, a tunnel, the smoke blowing in the wind of the pink sky, waving a pink tentacle, but their eyes are closed, the one daughter wearing a white night shirt, long shirt, I notice, white against the pink sky, and my partner touches my cheek and draws my mouth to hers, draws my tongue into her mouth and we hold that way, gentle sway and push, sucking and playing, mouth to mouth, standing there under the smoke, which blows our way and the smoke from below, smoke from windows across the city with the smell of the stomach, the melting pink sky, and the daughters have taken off their clothes by the smoldering sofa, and naked they play and hug on the roof, parents gone, fallen beside the fire, away in smoke, and I think, they are chasing each other, oblivious, and my eyes shut and open and my partner’s mouth pulls away from mine, her wet lips and my wet lips under this pink sky, red lips, and it bubbles from below, that feeling, that possession, she saw it coming, and now it swells and goes, swells and goes, while the daughters sit holding one another, the one, tall with long black hair, holding the other, shorter with long black hair, and they sit together on a broken lawn chair and they weep.