Yr Dead

by Sam Sax

Gucci and Prada models glare at each other from their rented billboards—two white women trapped in time inside their photoshopped faces and borrowed clothes.

We’re gathered outside one of the president’s many towers, a handful of barricades have been prearranged for us to march in circles inside. We are yelling in this penned-in section of fencing while traffic moves freely around us, demanding justice as business goes on undisturbed.

One of the girls compliments my anti-cop shirt (which I bought on Amazon) but not my makeup (which I stole from Sephora).

The shops thrive as the world burns, selling expensive nothing: Swarovski crystal chandeliers, computer wristwatches, designer pig leather hats.

Ennui, we call it in humans; doggui, no one calls it in dogs.

I suppose in the end, every utopia is funded by this other lesser world, that to imagine a better world means at least you have to have the means to imagine it.

In the movies, the world’s governments always come together to stop the meteorite, but in real life politicians say existential dread and keep making backroom deals to steady the price of corn and oil.

Empathy eats you alive. You can only survive by separating these two, by reading the news and not connecting the whole wet network of human suffering to the breath you are currently taking into your lungs. And if you cannot do this, well, what else is a person to do?

Route 90, 80, I-5, I-35. Behold, the asphalt snake wrapped around the belly of the world.

Of a place and out of place at once.