We came to this city for a reason
The war is a war of survival, we are told. We move our chairs to stay in the shade. In the evening, a woman reads stories from a brightly lit stage. She pauses periodically, waiting for the laughter to subside. I eat until my stomach hurts, then walk the silent streets with Joe. One by one, the lamp posts blink on. Dust coating our shoe soles. We prop each other up like a stack of books beneath a table leg. It is dream weather. It is too late to restart life, so we begin where we are, an unembellished sentence in the middle of a paragraph.