“It’s from the Daily Galaxy” – Susan Mikula
I tell Susan about walking around the Templo Mayor, the pyramid in the middle of Mexico City. The gutter for the sewer pipe they dug, a straight shot through the ruins, 1905. How they must have been so over all of it, the skull-shaped stones just another thing to roll your eyes at, chuck out of your weary way. Toss the fucking stone skulls on the rubble heap with the feathered mantles, jaguar bones, python skins, real skulls. I describe all this for Susan while we wait in the waiting room for her dog, beloved Poppy, who’s stashed somewhere getting chemo, and we talk about how time works. Out the window the Roosevelt Island tram slips back and forth along its wire. Susan tells me when they tried to dig a parking garage below LACMA, they unearthed a woolly mammoth stuck in the tar pits, where the earth bubbles up to the top, she says, so over all of that. She loves woolly mammoths like she loves the Weimar Republic, googles “ice baby” to find the third result, after Vanilla Ice, some ice cream truck: a baby woolly mammoth left behind for us to find and look at on her phone between Stickleton Soup recipes and them giving us back our damn dog. We read from the Daily Galaxy on coronal holes, which spew streams of high speed solar wind. Oh, our star! We make a note to look up the Carrington event, learn someday how solar winds can corrode pipes, disrupt even Susan’s Candy Crush.