I have three posts lined up for the same poem— they rhyme, in that way that I like. By the time I start writing, two of them have been taken down. One of them was a video of a flooded tent, where everyone had woken up in the night halfway under water. The other—I don’t know. I can’t remember it, what it was. It’s lost now. I only know that it rhymed; this rhyme is the last memory of it. Here is what it and the flooded tent rhymed with:

A girl, buried. The men are digging her out of the rubble. She is so small—skin white with ash, red with blood—you’ve seen it before and before and before, these colors and shapes—maybe everything rhymes. The men exclaim when they find her—“Ya’Allah!”

They call to each other, here she is, here she is. They call to her—“You are fine. Nothing has happened to you—Wallah, I swear, nothing has happened to you.”

Her body is limp. Her face has caved in. A crushed girl—a flooded tent—and something invisible—gone and silent. I wonder what it was.

Dig a trench to keep the rainwater from flooding your tent. Dig a grave. Dig a body out of the rubble. Dig a hole in a seven-year-old’s spine, plant a copper bullet like a seed. What will grow?

Here is a boy who is going to be made of tubes and wires for a little while. His chest—both his arms—his left leg, tubes, and wires. His right leg is just made of blood and fabric—like a frayed shoeless—like a tattered-to-strings cuff. They’ve got his right leg in a separate plastic bag, next to him on the table. They’ve got it sealed up and labeled, like they’re saving it for later, leftovers. They’ve got it labeled like evidence—like they’re going to try to prove something with it. What’s left to prove?

Maybe what they are thinking is that he will take it and bury it in the soil after this—feed it to a tree and make himself a cane from the wood. Maybe that will be whole-enough again—maybe.

Sometimes, it is complicated, and sometimes it is simple. Sometimes it is an intricate web of geopolitical relationships between dozens of states and non-state actors—and hundreds, if not thousands of people within those states, or halfway across the world—sometimes it is complicated.

And sometimes, it is a face in a bag. Just loose skin, that used to be pulled tight over the front of a skull—it looks so strange, even through all the blurring added to try and save our hearts. It was the children who found it, and here is the man they told, and here is what he has to say: “Allah is sufficient for me, and He is the best disposer of affairs.”

It’s simple.

Little potato-fingers, peel-thin, reaching, reaching—blindly. The body is at the wrong angle to be able to see out, so here are just the fingers. They find a man’s ankle, and they grasp—they can tell that they have touched something alive—a person? A person? They feel and they grasp and they hold and they hold and they hold and they hold.

This ceiling has gotten itself confused with a floor, and so here it is, ten feet below where it is supposed to be—and a foot above where it might have stopped. A slender gap between the building and the ground. You could crawl into it, if you were a cat, or if you didn’t need to breathe.

There are little hands and feet everywhere, inside of everything, between everything and everything else, reaching, reaching. They are like mosses in the rocks. They are like little chipmunks in the knothole—birds in the eaves.

One ambulance is coming, and then another, and then another, and as I am watching I am thinking about all the rubble between all these buildings that aren’t rubble yet, and has anyone written anything about traffic during the end of the world? The streets are lined with dead buildings like heavy snowdrifts, and everything’s down to a one-lane, if there’s any room for a lane at all.

It must be an absolute nightmare, getting around, I am thinking to myself.

What’s going to happen if someone comes down this ruined road from the other direction, against these three ambulances, I am thinking to myself, what’s going to happen? How will they get past each other? There’s no room towards either curb for anyone to pull over—there aren’t even any side-streets to turn off onto—will someone just have to back up and back up and back up until—

The missile comes crashing down like a fallen stage-light and the middle ambulance is dust, catching the sunshine—blinding. The last ambulance pauses for a moment, and then drives through the empty space in front of it, where the middle ambulance had used to be.

Easy enough, then.

A man is on his hands and knees—in a fantastic sweater—eating food off the dusty pavement. Just little bits and pieces. He picks them up—fingers and thumb, like coins—and scoops them into his mouth. It really is a fantastic sweater. Black and white— but look at the patterns! I want to find a sweater like that.

A girl sits in a wheelchair. She is waiting for her left leg to heal, which it will. The pin will help. The rack will help. The cast will help.

She is waiting for her right leg to come back.

She is waiting for her parents to come back.

The ice-crystals that have formed in these legs have turned them white—and shining. The dead infant dazzles in the lights of the makeshift morgue. Her little feet are the size of my fingers; she is a sparkling treasure.

Burning tents, burning tents—it is what it is what it is what it is what it is what it is. The rain falls, the wind blows, the tents burn, the waves on the beach come and go—smoke in the air. The people are running this way and that, and they are shouting this thing and that thing—they are wailing, they are hollering—but it is nobody’s first fire.

“La ilaha
Ilallah.”—

There is only one God beneath the rubble—

As above,
So below.