with cupped hands they sit, waiting with stained collars felicitated around their necks. look how the skin drives away in brisk dead tributaries. you recoil and, wait for the smoking hot food, to settle down the hoarse throat, like prehistoric fossils in amber. that afternoon when you poured on bathroom floor, your face hid in wet scaly fingers. I scatter skinny bones, across the city streets. not a place is empty. the subway is empty. spreading bedsheets in damp sewage waterways, singing of rats and dinner. for a while in a year, we were children in a candy store while the gentle snow galloped on the coastline.