City

When I was a child,
back in that small town,
with crickets and bats
and all the other things that small towns have
I would wake at night

just to sit in the quiet of the living room.
I would worry about someone
or something, a snake maybe, being in the
basement, or the garage

but I would be too afraid to go see.

It’s like that now, too
watching myself roam
from room to room,
in this little apartment,

wondering how we fit
our whole life in here,
each day
without the walls bursting,
without the windows smashing
without the water
flooding into the street.
How have we not run out of air?
Packed on the buses and the trains,
I wonder still
how we can even stand to touch each other
even accidentally.