The gas moves around us like new weather. Alone together and breathing in poison, all my language won’t be enough—only substitutions will do. My eyes are two sick onions. My eyes are goats slaughtered wrong. My eyes, twin libraries burning. May Day is, of course, also what the pilot says when the plane starts going down. A street medic finds me vomiting yellowish heat across the sidewalk. Wearing a red cross and a green mohawk, she stands over me and pours milk into the twin burning saucers of my eyes. In this way, I am welcomed, for a moment, into my new family.
