Screws were wrenched and broken off, so that the hard plastic siding fell away. Eaten seeds were spit out: apricot, sunflower. They walked the planet, not finding soil. In the hospital “lounge,” a brother was waiting on his brother, with a shoe missing. Infomercials cycled. A storm, they said. Prepare, they said.   --   A person falls, about to be mauled by cameras, but hands reached down to pick them up. Not many hands. The creatures are shoved off. Later when the person is alone, the creatures come back quietly, badges drawn. They mention the affinities that are in themselves criminal. When the bodies are disappeared, the committee says they cannot find the bodies, the committee may not ever find the bodies.   --   (My analysis ends sooner than it should. There are some things I cannot see: a thick pane of rain. I start thinking, I try to use this language, only to end up walking the night with you. My flawed friends. My enemies gleam there too. Even in telling you about the shortcomings of language, I end up using words like “impoverished.” These words are not hungry, they aren’t scratching the stomach awake.)   --   In the days of storm, walking around was better than believing in an inner light. Moving pieces around, though almost everything is bolted down, in preparation for a storm, was better than being moved. The smaller cruelties, terribly grained, pile up. The storm is a letdown and does not blow everything apart. But it rains. The rain moves.   --   The people who think the world more or less works: OK, as they are with leaving it at “more or less” to preserve their threadbare romance with the world.   --   When less is a pit. When executions happen at the edge of that pit. ` When the disappearing is evident. When the evidence becomes proof of romance. When banners for tragedy fly, and war continues. When the acid crocodile tears of politicians fall and burn away the flesh. & still the insistence of better is coming, investment is coming.   --   A pit fills with rain. The bodies create their own acidic juice, their metabolism making their own hot microorganisms. They eat the rock, creating subterranean voids, swallowing spectrum light. Raining, eating the rock, swallowing light. No returning reflection.   - OKI SOGUMI Oki Sogumi was born in Seoul, lives in Philadelphia (recently transplanted from Oakland), and writes poetry, speculative fiction, and into little boxes on the internet. She dreams commune dreams.