Low Tide Shanty District, Harrison Carpenter

 

 

 

For three days, the city has been on fire.

Flames so hot the streets of gold are beginning to run,

bringing pillagers and housewives with their prayer-lined tongues

to their knees at abandoned intersections,

armed with buckets, the collection plates for

melting footprints of fallen deities

and long lost relatives.

 

 

II.

 

The effects of tragedy on a person are often unbecoming.

I will have to pretend that I have always been this way,

as a desperate search for the gilded fossils of

Caesar’s sandals commences outside my window.

No one knows how

 

or has even attempted

to put these fires out

and a fourth day of heat

has charred the bottoms

of my already blistering feet.

 

 

III.

 

Mausoleum is a word

that dresses up a tomb,

not in flowers,

but in syllables.

In a moment of weakness, or strength, I press the urn

of Augustus against my breast

and fasten the buttons of my coat.

I have stolen the emperor’s ashes, and am thus far

unashamed.

 

 

IV.

 

When the rain finally comes,

it shuffles through this place like regret.

I remove the urn from my coat

and watch wide-mouthed children

watch the sky, dancing innocently

to the rhythm of their own relief.

 

 

V.

 

The fires have all gone out.

I have stopped pretending.

 

On the wet street, Augustus sits next to me, a glorified jar of mud.

I find the only building left whose walls are still erect,

dip my finger in his soot, and tell the story of our collapse:

 

“we have done this to ourselves”

and beneath it,

“this isn’t worth repeating”