How the Days of Love & Diphtheria

"Now this boy and how he lived under the soil while you—. How he mewed and dreamed under your hooves and vibrations, how he lived and slept under the burning house, the sirens. How he lived in a land blacker than your blackest masks, blacker than the sky you built from the soot and ash of his house. Now this boy, pale and ribs and trembling. How he dreamed his father’s heavy voice. How he dreamed his mother, the rip of her hair pulled, the clumps of skin dangling from roots. Now this boy and the cool damp of their world of soil. How he clawed and dug and buried and tunneled at the sounds of horses rampaging and snorting. No rivers but rivers of worms below the only world he ever knew. Now no women in robes the way he dreamed, their hands cold along his groin, the way he dreamed their dead-blue lips against his neck. How he dreamed them in gowns, amorous and rigid for the fumes. How no women but the flesh of the dead he dreamed beneath the ground. How you hunted for him with your horses snorting and kicking at the soil. How your long teeth dripped for the boy you could not find. How the blood of his mother, the blood of his father, on your knives and teeth. How the vibrations of your rampage shook his skin. Your horses and their wild greased hair, their dripping slather. How this boy and a world of soil and the excavations that followed. All the trucks and men with shovels. All the shirtless men, their burned skin flaking like sheets of Bible paper. How they dug with shovels and spades and their blazing knotted muscles, their sharp dried throats. These men and how they dug trenches. How they called the boy’s name into holes. How the house burned white behind them. All the grasses of the valley gone black and the sky filled with soot and smoke. The rumble of trucks digging into the soil. The boy who would not be found."