We’ll wake up, Sunday morning, and read the paper. Read each other. Become

consumers

of each other’s stories, a desperate reaching

for another body’s warmth—its words buoying us through a world. We carry

graveyards on our backs and I’m holding a lightning bug

hostage in one hand, its light dimming in the warmth

of  my fist, and in the other, a pen, to document its death. Isn’t that terrible?

I’ll ask you, shutting my fist once more.

In interviews, I frame my subject’s stories through a lens to make them digestible

to consumers.

I  become a machine. A transfer of information. They  become a plea for empathy,

an oversaturation of feelings we’ll fail at transforming into action.

What’s lost is incalculable.

           And at the end of  summer, the swimming pools will be gutted of  water.

          And it’ll be impossible to swim.