Ground Zero Gospel

We live inside a city that remembers every blow,
our bodies no different:
concrete split open, rebar ribs exposed,
skin flaking like paint off condemned buildings.

Sirens thread the bloodstream at all hours,
and somewhere inside the chest

a small fire keeps burning trash into heat,
old love letters, broken names,
whatever we can’t afford to carry forward.

The weather turned militant years ago.
Rain comes down like shrapnel.
Wind drags whole histories down the street.
We brace in doorframes that don’t hold,
watch the skyline unlearn itself in real time.
Still the heart—this stubborn generator—
kicks, misfires, surges back online,
running on whatever scrap of light
it scavenges from the wreckage.

Every loss leaves residue.
Ash settles in the lungs like unspoken truth.
We walk through each other’s aftermaths,
tracking footprints across floodwater glowing
with oil-slick rainbows and chemical stars.

And yet…

What we’ve been refuses erasure:
it migrates, feral and luminous,
like seeds blown through fallout,
taking root in the throats of the unborn.

One day this structure will give,
collapse inward without ceremony,
another address crossed off the map.
But the dust will not stay quiet.
It will rise, reorganize, insist,
stack itself into something breathing again.

Not untouched—never that—
but carrying forward the scorch marks as scripture,
building a new scaffold from remembered flame,
leaning—still—into the unfinished horizon
where even ruin imagines another hopeful beginning.