We walk through the waste of ourselves
that has washed into the streets
along with the mud and the deceased.
Bodies are littering the sidewalks,
we are too weak to bury our dead
and accustomed to the smell of decay,
the stench no longer bothers us.
So we step over the corpse
of someone we knew in a past life
(maybe a neighbor or a classmate
before the bomb hit
and deteriorated the life we’d built)
and we watch with yellow eyes
for any kind of movement on the horizon,
anything to keep us hoping
for a rescue.