Is my terracotta skin snapping
into fragments? Shouldn’t this
take more time? Erosion has
a millennial metabolism, right?
This is how sand happens, isn’t
it? We scour ourselves to pieces.
Grinding. Crushing. Friction.
I wonder who is on the floor of
my car, swirling down my shower
drain. I wonder who has entered
the landfill of sorrow tonight.
Who has finally thrown his arms
upwards, in release. Who has
begun falling in dusty super particles.
It’s poetic, right? It makes the
whole process tolerable.
Think of Dresden, Hiroshima, Pompeii:
no molten ash, no terror.
Think of the villages orbiting Auschwitz, 1943.
Blonde children with icy eyes, who’ve
confused sameness with goodness.
Imagine them, playing in something
falling from the sky, something their
parents had the decency to call soot.
Kamden Hilliard is a rising freshman at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. He has been published in Crashtest and Missive.
