unto day

The grease on my pizza fractures into pools. The pools blink in the sterile white light. Anthony drinks from a can of peach tea.

The muscles in his pale neck contract and release, contract and release, head lost in a halo. He wipes his lips with the back of his wrist. He asks, “Why don’t you eat?”

I’m not hungry. I’d like to vomit, in fact. Hot spit settles up beneath my tongue.

“Hey, Anthony,” I say. St. Anthony, patron saint of love and lost things. “How about the dog park?”

We kick cans. Bud Ice. We jump for plastic bags strung up in the cowering trees. Dust swirls beneath the hemorrhaging sun.

A scrap of pizza for you. And one for you. And—oh, alright—another tiny piece for you. Do this, in remembrance of me. One hysterical poodle and two slobbering labs, my congregants.

Anthony rubs the belly of a Weimaraner, pewter-like in the dust. He rolls over, sticking his hands and feet in the air. She blinks, unamused.

Fat hands jut beneath my armpits, yank. “Excuse me.” The speaker, a woman, has a face like a pig. It blots out the bleeding sun. “You can’t be in here if you’re not a dog-owner.”

Turned-up nose, like a pig. Bristled upper lip, like a pig. Beady black eyes, like a pig.

I ask, “Is there a sign that says that?”

“There’s no sign. It’s a rule,” says the pig-faced woman.

“Oh, well, in that case.” I toss the last of the pizza.

“You can’t feed them, either!”

She pries the spit-soaked scrap from the poodle’s mouth, her fingers like Vienna sausages.

“This is my dog, and dairy disturbs his eczema and his bowel.”

I thought pigs liked shit. Like to eat it, roll around in it. I ask, “Is that another rule?”

“You cannot feed the dogs. You do not have the right to be here. This park is for dogs and their owners, only.”

Huffing and oinking and grunting, like a pig. “Only!”

I shut my eyes against the erupting sun. Anthony hooks his pinky finger onto mine.

At Union Square, the climate clock shuffles down to arbitrary doomsday, as if the world would up and evaporate at another 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

I say, wishful thinking. In our dreams. It will get worse, but slowly.

We, the people, look like bi-pedal cockroaches. The air is thick as egg yolk. Yellow like it, too. If everybody could just shut up. Just shut up for, like, two minutes. Please?

Now, that guy over there, the one on the bench—leaning forward, eyes closed, mouth agape, drool forming a glassy column between his bottom lip and the ground—he’s got the right idea.

Whiff of acetone in the hot wind. Methane clouds overhead.

Someone says, “Buy my mixtape.”

Someone says, “Care to save the Amazon?”

Someone says, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

Someone says, “You, girl. Yes, you. Take heed.”

I smile at her. I smile at Anthony. I ask, “And him, what about him?”

“Who?”