A Woman At Ground Zero

12 the minnesota review Elizabeth Macklin A Woman At Ground Zero Time to time, I feel a knotted sun, solar plexus, rise like the underside of the city overturned: here are the emptied hollows where water ran; there, broken-hearted cuts for unearthed cables stripped of our copper current and our voices; underneath, the twisted rails of complicated trains that couldn't get there from here. And I think, So it was all topweighted? built too fast by no one — in short, on sand— and so fell through? I forget the facts, the jackhammers and drivers. The slow-swung crane— the culvert lowered into the pit, daylight moving shoals of orange helmets over it. I forget the hands shading the eyes that long to see a wide, completed avenue with caravans of flagged and yellow trucks parading between tall trees, a joyride, barrelling over the worksite — macklin 13 because that has not yet happened. And because that hasn't happened I see a scavenger wheel, alone alive, over an upturned city, and find a hard, unhopeful woman in my chest from time to time. ...