John Morgan
	The Unsafe House Waking after the dream to a slick December gloom, a threat of end-time hovering around the room, he goes over the escape route knowing the attackers, a posse of children with rifles and machetes, could smash down the closet door, and, finding his family huddled there, finish them off with a few brisk rounds to the head. Better instead to scramble up through the ceiling access way and into the space below the canted roof where they might go undetected, and as he sits up and starts to dress —  a sickle moon slash-sinister in the west-it comes to him that they can make it up there using the bureau drawers            for steps                       and closing                                  them behind, so that once they've replaced the sheetrock ceiling door they could wait it out in that unlit frigid space. But they'll need extra sweaters-hurry, for God's-sake hurry!—  as the enemy rabble is breaking into the house like they do, it seems, on a daily basis in those far-off desperate places where justice and mercy have lost their cachet and life holds a lot less value than in his dreams. Psalm (after Nietzsche) That day is coming soon when our people, all the cousins, pets, children will begin to disperse like the insects of summer after the petals fall. And where do they go, those bees, those dragonflies? Into the soil where they break into pieces, a wing, an antenna, a thorax, absently dreaming of spring, as the long cold settles over them, their buzzing and sipping forgotten. And a great age passes like those lumbering eras we learned of in grade school, or the unbelievable time it takes to make a star and its planets and evolve a living world — all gone to ground, and trillions of years slip by in silence under the earth, but then one day, one millennium, a gentle humming and something oozing, gripping, reaching, this relentless longing toward light-urgent, fantastic. It could happen.