The Sky City

I live up there in fast shadows of a top floor window woman,

the

pulling black hair from her brush

sky

I’m warned that you don’t live here by the child on the stairs who with his shard of parking lot concrete defends your pink apartments

& under that night’s bored helicopter I have made the lunches for tomorrow— once I dug a grave for someone’s cat— slack-eyes unheld by thin meteors of bone that float outside the socket Always this gratuitous animal display of teeth we code as smile, to even have survived somewhat, freak out in your sleep on a plane

city

Days I haven’t slept enough I’m summoned to the captain who built the house they took apart to make the bank of benches at the urgent care Invisible light, the sun streaming in to the citadel on stolen horses His table’s set with wooden steak chops, plastic peas He’s chewing something small like nuts & nodding, nodding at his

suffocated embers