This is Not a Wedding in the Dark

The billionaires are building bunkers, and I’m bleeding onto the sidewalk.

This is the rat race, soul-striking: spoiled milk in your coffee, candles cause cancer, and there’s Parkinson’s in the country-club grass. Arsenic’s in tampons and it is against the law to die pregnant and they can’t find a control group for microplastics, honestly; oh, but I don’t mind, “My hometown was a Superfund site,” I’m used to it, a house haunted, and plateletless.

The cost of our collective conscience wasn’t dire or desperate circumstance, it was Free Shipping—“I’m serious, and hurry up with my order, kid!”—even though the radiation they’re calling polyester means, probably, no kids of your own. Fight for scraps at the thrift store though, you might stand in front of a balloon arch, “We’re having a baby!!!” Two idiots, no ring. Court-ordered child support, half-siblings.

You can’t sit down at a Waffle House past midnight, now-too often they were getting painted with little grey bullets. You can, alternatively, walk up to the window and get shot at in the parking lot as your order your home fries, behind the homeless men and their hologram disciple friends coughing gas station marijuana; “World War III will start on a Monday, God told me,” one of them says, and it sounds more convincing than anything, actually, that you’ve heard in a while.

This world can’t offer you empathy, but it’s got an algorithm.

People in cages, “It’s all a damn shame,” Sex traffic, “Yeah, I heard about that, change the channel?” Our hopes are no longer than the pharmacy line, where someone is always trying not to cry.