In the field of traumas come the base savannas—crosshairs tighten on the flaring pink of the evening. Recognize the world. After the bit of blue, after a window opened to air and the portioned stereo of love and grandeur, after— mother sews a fell-off button, heats a stew, sews at the factory, re-stews, tires, starts (again), father shortens a barrel, leans blast-weapons beneath windows, stacks ammo with scream and apocalypse. Under cover, you are dead behind the couch when they knock. From the first, in the glossed-over city where none reprimand violence, the palms executed along the auto avenues thrive— a pitch-staggered procession in white-painted trunks. The memoir has shown how bitter and relentless is the rind— privacy flowers pubescent, hopeful to outlast time. Traffic flows or stops on elevated structures in denial of the seven- point-two, and in the aftermath of advertising, children wander the highway in search of litter. The citizens are trembling among the trembling. Against the green strip—against the urbane and its expansion into the continent, the boulevard is the last boundary between the sky and the low-lying building, though it is too accomplished among the rest of the wreckage. They have their memories. The trigger is set on annihilation.
From A Carnage in the Lovetrees by Richard Greenfield. Copyright © 2003 by the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted by permission of the University of California Press. All rights reserved.