How To Destroy A Building

While driving to the mountains with my son

we pass a burning car on the highway.

I check his face in the mirror. I don't know if he saw it.

He did. He is silent for another mile, and then,

Mommy?

he says,

Do you think they got out in time?

Yes. I think so.

I tell him,

They had four doors

to escape from. And windows, too.

I have told him how the timeline of my life

has been defined by burning buildings.

How I was conceived because a man fell asleep

holding a glowing cigarette in an old hotel.

He knows this origin story well: how it was fire

that brought me, then him, to life.

When I was twenty-one, I sold soap inside a tower

that was best known for reaching itself like an arm

into the sky over New York City. A tower that had a twin,

until one day, the siblings were replaced with black clouds.

It is 2024. Every day, the internet teaches me how

to destroy a building. Just last week, a restaurant [her bedroom]

[a hospital] is now a toothed structure. Concrete streets are sandboxes.

On a Monday night, I drink tequila with a friend

who helped clean up the fallen towers with his hands.

We whisper when we talk about the news. We remember

how even back then, even when soot swarmed the city,

never were our hearts so sore to want to pitch

red rockets that collapse and desaturate

someone else's enormous animation.

To turn everything electric into grayscale.

Even with that brand new, raw despair

still erupting in our throats, never did we wish

to make children become ash.