The New Twilight Zone: “Empty City”
The cloud cover enveloping our hull
splits, shifts to our back like a parachute,
and we descend to the city below. Its three
mighty rivers: now kinked, dribbling hoses.
The scent of seething biomass—brown mounds
going green again with psyched, thriving mold—
reaches us far up as we are—and look: plumes
of smoke snaking into the air there. Flames
and dry backyard blowup pools below coming
into focus, but too much sun to see the windows
in the buildings all have x’s in their eyes.
Between white lines dash-dash-dashing the roads:
not a car. The voice on the tower mic:
silent as a bee hive.
splits, shifts to our back like a parachute,
and we descend to the city below. Its three
mighty rivers: now kinked, dribbling hoses.
The scent of seething biomass—brown mounds
going green again with psyched, thriving mold—
reaches us far up as we are—and look: plumes
of smoke snaking into the air there. Flames
and dry backyard blowup pools below coming
into focus, but too much sun to see the windows
in the buildings all have x’s in their eyes.
Between white lines dash-dash-dashing the roads:
not a car. The voice on the tower mic:
silent as a bee hive.
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Jennifer L. Knox's new book of poems, Days of Shame and Failure, will be published by Bloof Books in 2015. Her other books, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Drunk by Noon, and A Gringo Like Me are also available from Bloof. Her poems have appeared four times in the Best American Poetry series (1997, 2003, 2006, and 2011), as well as in the anthologies Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present and Best American Erotic Poems.
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