country of ladybugs

there's a clarity within the cold, today. the unpenetrable sky, icy clear and blue, becomes almost unbearable by my shoulders. pulp in my orange slice glistens in the afternoon sunlight like biomorphic glass, i can feel my heart steadily pumping, the man holding up a cardboard sign across the street disappears into a police car. gray chunks of ice and soot line the street like sidewalk scabs. i lick the orange juice frost off my bottom lip as a ladybug crawls up the seam of a corner in the wall.

many of them are faded in color, my friend says maybe it's because they're old. there are thousands around here, like a collection of tiny heartfelt pebbles, drops of blood and insect, some moving through the dust, some dying in a haze. a small breeze picks them up in a tornado, their tiny, dry bodies swirling in the air like a post mortem dream. the silence is stirring, the space evolving, and an emptiness, a nothing, somehow emerges in and out of concrete. a "fertile void." i sigh and feel my heart skip a beat in the peace.