Day 17

Challenge: Write about something that happened yesterday.

Unreal City

Lizzie and I took the bus north to Michigan Avenue,
where throngs of people wove around each other
like marine animals, drifting schools of fish, startling in

and out of the glittering stores as if into coral reefs.
The tides pulled us, relentless, block after block,
through towering shoals of commerce. In a crosswalk,

while shark SUVs nudged the stream, nosing a gap
into the fleshy current, two boys nipped and tumbled
and darted at each other, a pocket of chaos

ignored by their family pod. “Don’t scootch 
in the middle of the street,” Lizzie snapped, as we
swept behind them to the curb,

saying the human thing, voicing what I’d half
been thinking, deep in the wreck 
of my mother brain, waking me at last

from my cold sea dream.