A New Levittown, 2050

1.

Blue afternoons at the disused airfield as they lay the foundations in rectangles of concrete—like pixels shattering the earth. We descend the remnant of encircling hills, once a nature reserve, and I position my feet on the runway’s broken lines. As they pour more concrete you inspect the contract, saying we’re 26 construction steps from the new suburban dream. But I can’t have a red front door, or the cherry blossom and midnight roses I dreamed of planting; I won’t be able to walk out at night in my dressing gown. We each have white doors and 34 pieces of shrubbery. The contractors make their way across gridlines while I imagine an old 737 pointing towards Madrid.

 2.

The fires encroach even further than last year. You say you’ll sell your coastal property, remarking on our house’s sensible altitude. Tangles of concealed pipes chase our footsteps; data downloads even as we sleep. You have a new job with a three-year contract and we’re buying an Amaze-Fidelity™ screen: a wall of wildlife we’ll never have to feed. You talk about the StormShell™ encasing our house. On slow mornings, I remember the books you bought when we married, enriched by so many archaic ideas—Virginia Woolf, who understood sadness and Marianne Moore’s aesthetic whimsy. I wish Nu-Plastik-Touch™ beguiled you less. I want to walk outside and disappear.

Quotidian Sublime

—There is an ocean floor between their limbs.

—A cat’s tongue; a sense of rising.

—At midnight she reads lines of conversation she scribbled on the back of receipts, blue ink bleeding onto her handbag’s inside seam.

—Outside, garbage collectors curse, dropping a trash can.

—Alert as bubbles in vintage champagne.

—Her phone vibrates with seven messages, and she tucks it under her pillow.

—In this windowed view, the mountains have shrunk to the size of hills.

—She remembers his saturated polo shirt as he mowed the lawn.

—He envisions her hair in water; silent implications of drowning.

—She has swum with him for twelve years but he has never removed his swimming cap.

—On Saturdays they drink coffee and eat cannoli, yet she has never enjoyed the filling.

—He holds his cup with a bent little finger.

—Sex has become mean reds and soft blues.

—“I’m home,” he says, as if in conquest’s aftermath.

—She watches Netflix, cradling her phone.

—He thinks of what he should say while saying nothing.

—She throws her underwear in the trash.

—A thunderstorm throws lightning like Thor.