The Interrogation. Michael Bazzett

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       The City

      Once we were ten miles outside the city, it

      vanished completely. We suspected this

      happened from the top down, with television

      antennae fading into ether and asphalt

      shingles glimmering, like fish scales,

      then flecking into nothingness.

      For a mere

      moment buildings were reduced to rib cage,

      people illuminated within the lattice of beams,

      bent over ironing boards and countertops,

      chopping cucumbers into slender green coins

      until they and their knives and even the blade-

      scarred board had vanished into empty air.

      But there were also those who asserted

      buildings softened into something like

      sodden cardboard and settled slowly into

      themselves. One contingent even claimed

      nothing happened at all: the city simply

      shifted like a sleeping animal, dreaming

      of our return.

      We decided to confirm

      our top-down theory by hiding a camera

      in the woven branches of a linden tree

      then climbing into our van and driving

      until the city sank into the dusky horizon.

      There, someone said, pointing, it’s done it again.

      And it was true, the impassive brick and steel

      were gone. We cranked a U-turn and rumbled

      home over the asphalt we’d just traveled

      in hopes of catching our city in the breathless

      unclothed moment before she had once again

      reassembled herself, down to bits of rusted

      hardware on the roadside and the actors

      hired to loiter outside of bars.

      But this time,

      as we coasted slowly into our neighborhood,

      past the impostors and hastily reconstructed

      but nonetheless convincing details, we smiled

      quietly at one another.

      The van creaked to a stop under the tree

      and we leaned the ladder into its thick crown

      when suddenly something lifted

      scraping into flight, croaking

      like a rusted door—

      as if the tree had cracked

      open and coughed its dark

      and broken

      heart into the sky—