I see jet exhaust in the sky, a single line that stretches from one cloud to the next and wish to jump high enough so I can use it like a chinning bar, do a Simone Biles launch into another universe, a double half-twist, but there is no getting away from a time that feels so unreal, more unreal than a chinning bar floating in the sky.
Artists are familiar with such things, Dali’s melting clocks painted on a canvas so hot, a thermometer might exhaust itself, a landscape where the sky has become a thin wash of yellow. tornado weather.
Buildings knocked off their foundations, bodies buried in the rubble. No rescue crews.
To say these are surrealistic times misses the mark. In the past, Canada was a sanctuary for soldiers who refused to fight in Vietnam. My eighty-six-year-old friend is moving next week to Canada, and my cousin relocating from Colorado to Europe, both wanting to escape the wild fires. The destruction. Ash drifting onto every city sidewalk and field, every school and store where immigrants are being arrested, members of Congress hunted and handcuffed by the FBI. Clinics and libraries shuttered. Smoke rising, reaching higher, even higher.