There are no zombies, no fires, no epidemics, riots, panic.
The cats have all survived, but we don’t know whose side
they’re on – my friend and I welcome them like family.
In the pub on what we think is Thursday, there’s just a lot
of silence where life used to be. We’ve been looking
for others, finding none. We’ve been watching each stitch
of the patchwork we knew unravel to scraps, analysing
the undoing together, stripping away the patterns, textures,
find a stretched darkness we can easily share. Reinvention
is no longer relevant, but it goes on: we scavenge rainbows
for our hair, gems for faces, like we always did; we scribble
words in an untested order and read them out loud. Mirrors
without smoke held up to tangled stories, our wires and webs
crossed in the time before, and the ones running parallel used
as parables, revelations; the two of us, the empty city, the abyss.
—Published 21st November 2018
About Kate Garrett
Kate Garrett is the editor of three web journals, and her own writing is widely published. Her most recent chapbook is Land and Sea and Turning (CWP Collective, 2018), and her first full-length collection, The saint of milk and flames, is forthcoming from Rhythm & Bones Press in April 2019.