Xander Fuhrer

Discivilization and Its Contents

It was a leaning in three layers—the world, the city, and its people, all dripping with the weight of household objects in a late-career Van Gogh, sighing as they sunk down and out, eyes and windows and oceans glazed over, caught atop the languid shore between waking nightmare and fevered dream of home. And in another age the people would have fled from underneath the city’s towers, saving children and a few old photographs before they ran to gaze as their cubed homes collapsed; now they’re just too tired. The buildings settle in their abject comforts as they loom, unwilling to let go and fall; the people wander ‘round beneath the shadows, unseeing of the flames and nose blind to the slowly melting steel, trapped inside the warm geometries of youth they conjure in their heads. And of course the world itself falls to the past’s seduction, a romance green and tendrilled overtaking what was built.