Bundles of flowers :: shelter for some great body :: armor-shelled :: crawling :: promise this body leaves :: lonely arms stretching to meet the ground beneath :: we suffer just like our mothers :: backs bent from burden like terrestrial isopods trusting their bodies to fetal themselves for safety :: promise us something far below these fields of fire :: more than a razing for concrete slabs ventriloquizing home or something promising belonging :: stories of burning as air hangs heavy :: as air tries to lean on us for support :: weightiness is getting too hot to carry :: it loads itself onto our neck :: head bowed as in prayer :: a small cub who can’t find mother boiling beneath car hood :: ghosts mouthing a silent honking :: it’s been years since scary didn’t have a sound :: now there’s a ringing in our ear if we expose our neck for too long :: the sun beats us down :: walking along the river we feel ourselves becoming memory as basin shrinks :: as it disappears sediments of us with it :: drowning :: we already miss us :: this fire crying as it runs down streets to remind us all to breathe ash deep :: plural legged curled bodies just below soil surface teach us about decay :: teach us about feasting on deterioration :: bodies tucked into themselves teach us how to face decomposition :: their gills must breathe in moist land but find themselves drowned when submerged in ever rising water :: an aquatic mother’s embrace :: they teach us how to survive between a rock :: a lost place :: promise us a door built :: not out of rock or tree :: not metal or soil :: knock one day :: we promise there will be no body home :: cross a certain threshold :: home eventually refuses to stay built :: heat makes waves in stillness :: we can see it if we pay close enough attention :: the mirage in front of us :: on the verge of fading out of sight :: we shouldn’t pretend like warmth is incapable of quaking even the grandest of monuments :: trembling as they fall :: our eyes shivering :: in them we hold close the small chicory struggling to breathe between sidewalk cracks in concrete :: between relentlessness :: pressurizing heat from bustling bodies :: shuffling feet too hot to remember breathing :: our mother crying at rot scorched bodies :: dissipating memory :: fading smoke :: distant constellations of charred bones.