GROUND ZERO
My city was forever changed. And I wasn’t there. This attack has been recorded from every angle, and reported by every newscast on the planet. I am here now, assessing the damage one month later. It is the end of another day of sifting debris and hundreds of workers descend the vast hole, coated in the film from the wreckage.
I slip behind a parked crane and zoom in on a man hacking the dense soot out of his lungs.
A woman exits a trailer carrying a blender and an armload of nutritional supplements.
This is her cocktail to get her through the day.
She removes her hard hat leaving a halo-shaped residue of particulates and shakes her head.
The light catches the dust that sprays the air.
Before she walks away she turns and gazes into the bottomless pit.
Maybe she’s looking to see if the day’s work has made a dent.
I hold up my camera but she turns away from me. I am just another spectator.
I tried to find a way to photograph the pit, but the enormity was impossible to capture from street level.
There is no photograph I can take that will satisfy me. The sunset offers closure.
I wait till a ray of light folds over the sagging American flag.
A makeshift monument was erected from remnants of the steel girders
and draped with a piece of canvas hanging from the cross like a shroud.
