Printouts

Dylan Landis

Janet reported that gray taffeta
curtained her walls. It was delicate. When touched, the ashen silk dissolved
around her thumbprint.
A policeman escorted her home, gave her an hour. She spent it
lugging chrysanthemums up to her terrace, sunspots
for workers dismantling the darkness.
For herself, she filled a suitcase.
Sue took the subway to Chambers
because Canal was flooded, buckled, pierced.
In an e-mail to L.A., she wrote that a drapery of dark particulate matter
refused to part, that the air pierced by Trinity’s spire
smelled like burnt mattress. She knelt, grateful for unsplintered saints.
Rhoda wrote that Mike, bereft of briefcase and ferried over in his shroud of dust,
bowed into the sluice from a garden hose
borne by a soldier.
Terry e-mailed that the sky, like uncrazed porcelain, was unflawed.
Susan said she was still combing glass from her husband’s hair
in the morning when he moved too fast
in the night when he talked in his sleep.