Populace

The first city draws breath whose residue will serve as a lexicon for climatologists. Her inhalations thicken the already moist air, dense and close. The out-breath leaves everything thin and cold—freezes the moisture from your lips. Seasons pass as respiration in city time. Skyscraper cilia and subterranean capillaries osmose the air from borough to borough as though driving snow and sticky sweat were blood cells and platelets to keep her avenues in repair. She lives. She breathes. We are symbionts on the lipid bilayer of her every cell, all trained by the passage of centuries, operating by the script of what it means to live here.

But here in the west, the largest animal seems dying in spite of her age: younger and fresher. Though less fettered by habit and inertia, she has become choked with cold metal. Her vessels are spilled open on the surface, not hidden below. The seasons wheeze and then crawl out to sea; a difference between torpid and mild. Unrestricted by a skeleton of rivers and estuaries as was the first, this city blossoms like cancer. She suffocates under her own weight. There is no clarity or purpose, and the organs of its function seem misshapen and borderless. Here we are viruses and parasites sucking whatever life remains for consumption.