The time of desperate cabbage is over. Nonetheless, it reseeds itself in the old socialist plots, those concrete fortifications against famine. The misshapen heads are pale and short on water, long on the weeds of distraction. Who can remember the bad times? Were they even bad? The plot next door offers a freshly planted fruit tree, the soil around it hoed, dark and plump. It also holds some lime-yellow blades of grass, dead siblings, waving here and there.

Your childish, careful hands and your eyes. Then rest. Again. Like Noah, you are building a ship so that someone will have something to board once it begins. Insert tab A into slot A. The gigantic paper ship has just begun to know itself that whole long Saturday afternoon. You know that your father might kill your mother. You have no say. Isn’t this an old story? You keep building, inserting tab Z into slot Z while outside waves of snow twist and buckle into doves and oblivion.