— A mold has formed on this one, small splotches of off-green, spores that blister into faint rings spiraled, a cosmos-shaped mosaic of bacteria.
(6)My father curled in my mother’s lap, her face obscured by paper mask. Behind the camera I wore one also, my breath enclosed around my face. We’d made the masks after the news reports of whole hotels full of people collapsing overnight. Planes falling from the air. Light bulbs and TVs bursting. Dad looks so small in mother’s arms. His hair’s down to his ass. Her eyes are shut. His eyes are open — the light blue splintered black, the skin around his lashes puckered, moist. The masks had come too late.
— The insects got to this one quicker — the paper is eaten through and through.
(7)The attic, stocked with Father’s things, packed in unlabeled cardboard boxes. Stacked up so high on top of one another there’s no room to move. In the upper left-hand corner, a hive is being built.
— The whole photo blanched a slight shade browner, as if viewed through beer bottle glass.
(8)Several copies of the same image: me in a corduroy shirt, hair mussed, not smiling, the last school photo me or anyone in the neighborhood would pose for before the walls were buried underwater. Before the whole city began swelling. Before trees fell on the house. In my eyes the ricochet of such a short flash — the zapped gunk running of my pupils, my clenched teeth.
— Each copy of me offers a slight variety of spoil — some so warped you can’t even read me — some where there is nothing left to hold.
(9)The backyard covered end to end with pupal casings.
(10)The concrete cul-de-sac cracked wide open.
(11)An overexposed image of the sky swelled purple and maroon, taken a few hours before it started with such raining, bringing the very wet that ruined these pictures.
— These three are all primarily intact.
(12)*
— This one’s so destroyed I can’t tell what it might have been.
(13)Mother, shaggy headed, sober, standing in the stairwell to the attic, her soft cheeks flaked brown and teeth loosed like Tommy’s had, holding a hammer against her bloated stomach, staring straight on into the camera to shatter the lens with both her eyes.
— The edges of this photo are mush — the paper so runned and crummy it comes off on my fingers.
(14)The front door in the kitchen, boarded over — my sore, banged thumb half-obscuring the lens. Not visible in the photo is everything that door held out, the endless scratching, gnashing, drone.
— This photo is stuck to the front of another that won’t pull off without ruining. In the loose corner of the covered photo are striated reams of light.
(15)The hole in our roof, taken from my mother’s bed where I laid for hours trying to breathe her sickness in. Hating my skin for not getting paler. My teeth for not rotting out. Wondering why I would have to be the one to hold the camera. Beyond the roof, the sky scratched black in the middle of the day. And Mother still beside me, her face grown over, fingers knotted.
— Pasty, smudged and crumbling, buggy, marred: even the ruin is ruined.
(16)My mother as a young girl, blonde, holding a blue balloon larger than her torso; her grin so real it looks inhuman, her lips stretched and eyes ignited. In the air around her a kind of haze, a glow, a swelling that has nothing to do with weather.
— This one is clean, if rumpled, from all these days I’ve kept it clutched and slept with it pressed against my forehead; endless minutes trying to pry her from the paper, to make her flat lips whisper clearer what to smother, where to grow.
GLITTER
The sky alive and brimming, worse than the prior dust had been — geese like disco balls; magic breathing; the sun a holograph on the horizon — some great celebration overhead to which we had not and would not be invited. The glitter came through the punctured roof and stuck in our hair, our moist wounds, our running eyes. I couldn’t even think to see regardless. I sat nowhere and let it drench me. I licked my arms to taste the shimmer.
EXPONENTIAL
The wall stood on the morning. Through the window I could not see. A huge flat black on the horizon. I’d slept until my belly woke me gnawing. I’d learn to call it Brother. I got out of bed and made my way through the webbing I’d hung to keep the nits off. Not that I slept. Not that I ever, or even wanted, as when I did I held visions: not of what was coming, but what had already been. The screaming of my father as they dragged him down the stairs. Who ever wants to hear their father bawling? My mom had gone in hush. I slunk into the hallway where water’d warped the walls, the paisley paper run to mush. Mold had spread over our family portrait. The overhead lamp lay flush with eggs that hid the light. I’d wrapped my head in gauze. I’d used the same strip for several months, until the cloth turned brown over my mouth from the steady stream of gunk and rheum. Now it was inside us. Tickling my dreamhead. A bit more of me each day. Outside the porch sat rotten, lapped by the lake swoll to an ocean. So many days I’d sat on sand and watched my little brothers splash, and dad had flushed our dinner from that small bog until the fish grew so large he couldn’t reel them. And then the rain; and then the swelling — the pond’s circumference tripled, quadded. Soon you couldn’t see one end from the other, there where we’d once been baptized, Marco Polo’d. It grew to lap the house. One night a cod blipped at my window, his scummy eyes unblinking, a mnemonic whisper through the glass: What will one day come will come and find us, you and I and I and you goodnight.
Now near the middle of the dead tide the wall divided the wrecked sky — monolithic, blue and edgeless, stretching forever out at both ends and upwards into wherever. The sun still sat on our side, blinking in and out under erupted clouds, but the other half of everything — where the mall’d been, where my grandmother drowned with her reams of hair, where so many nights alone now I’d watched the moon try still to gleam — gone. Even from my distance I saw splotches where birds had flown into the flat surface. Below their bodies floated. Such things I’d fished up since the stilling: copper bottles, bits of head, even once a violin — some nights I sat and tried to play the songs I could remember. The wall absorbed all sound. Even in mid-afternoon, when on most days you could hear the buzzing from far off — the shouting men, creak of machines — the silence hurt my mind. The water was colder than I remembered. Its new grip blipped my blood. I’d come to wash my face the day before, to clean away the dust that wore the air. Heat had mowed the fields dry, had withered my first brother. His pink skin grown tight like old tobacco. The second brother starved. As of now I weighed eighty pounds, at least by my best guess in the mirror; its silvered surface cracked down the middle. I was good at not eating. I’d stayed thin even when each night we all sat down together. In want of ending up one day on glossy paper, my skin forever memorized. The wall seemed to watch me now with one enormous lidless eye. I went inside and shut the door and turned around and turned the lock—I hadn’t in forever; what to hide from?; who would come? Down the hall then, to my bedroom, that door closed also, that lock keyed, through the webbing with my back turned, back to bed among the wet to weep.