Unwinnable is the word on every tongue
She is not concerned with that
She travels west
to the foothills of the Sierra Madres
everything in a small Norwegian backpack
Citizens in suicide suits mimic meteors against the atmosphere
We are on a plateau above a crystal lake
She takes a journal from her pack
and shows me a page of hand-scrawled circles, lines, arrows
hard-scratched text in ballpoint black
Office towers cascade like glaciers
Open your eyes! she says
slapping the journal shut in my face
She kicks off her sandals, leaps off the cliff
I teeter at the edge
Kidnappings, executions, the plague of the century
She’s floating on her back in blue cutoffs
She nods at me, come down
I’m letting go of logic, descending
plunging into the prehistoric water
No one believes anymore in the practicality of tears
Finally surfacing
I look up to where we were
What about all our stuff? I say
Our shoes, your journal, our packs?
Listen to the unmodulated cries of civilians in the besieged city
We are kneeling on the grass
She has peeled back a patch of sod
See the worms, she says, knitting the world
This is how we start again
Boxboard villages emerge from the dust
