The buildings are singing each other sad songs about chemicals. They are not clean or real. They are a sales pitch. They are animals of their own, boarded windows for eyes, a fur we call sun. We’ve slowly become part of a life which has become little more than the force which drags a few leaves down the road, eats the fences away, listens to the buildings love each other. A girl wearing a stocking cap with a face knitted in it shakes outside the health clinic like an old man’s whistle, perhaps listening to headphones, perhaps not. She is pregnant with a building. The building is already burned.
Corey Zeller is the author of Man vs. Sky (YesYes Books, 2013) and You and Other Pieces (Civil Coping Mechanisms, forthcoming). His work has appeared in Puerto del Sol, Mid-American Review, Indiana Review, The Colorado Review, The Kenyon Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Diagram, Salt Hill, West Branch, Third Coast, The Paris-American, The Rumpus, and PEN America, among others. He currently works in crisis support at a facility for children and adolescents with mental and behavioral issues.