This poem is an installment of our In the Open Air series on poetics and Empire, curated by Aurielle Marie.
"His father, Omar, owned a clothing store off the market square… and the family lived nearby in a spacious if shabby corner home on the Rue de lâ Avenir—Future Street—near the local police station."
It comes and goes, this longing to carve into the news its overgrown carcass flayed, across pages and screens, into its constituent parts. Here we are again scrying for the second text: inset message, veiled threat, its infidelity to our lives. It has us living hand to eye, letters from loud tongues are counterfeit minted ground cockroach paste pablum. It enters the optic nerve, travels a news circuit, and is excreted through lips, hand to eye to mouth, in reverse mastication. Sentences grind teeth and language launders extermination in an automatic all-night laundromat streaming on a static station, sleep-helm-operated by algorithm and a series of substitutions long ago and widely agreed upon: say "marginalized" but not "those subject to the moving walls of state apparatus" say "search for the suspect" not "execution squad" say "arab unrest" not "palestinian refusal to die" It comes and goes, and my appetite turns on words I wish I had, or those I'm grateful others do We knew then that "peace treaty" was accurately translated as land grab, that "civilization" is always a word for genocide and "democracy" merely a thin tarp for domination say patriot, but whisper: willing agent of supremacy read terrorist, and understand: enemy of this orderly abbatoir It comes and goes, and oh, how quickly we go from protest to suspect to dead with no intervening state of being rarely "the accused" seldom "the defendant" Our neighbors may be shocked, beaten, blown away for missing a stop sign or taillight, for being mistaken for some other face surveillance hallucinates. say "sovereignty" but mean kingdom for a queen, a regent regally dispensing the good fruits of this threshed landscape It comes back around, where lawful domination reigns, brutality rains down, raw power holds reins and bullets riddle us, with our bodies so suspicious to police, private contractors, and politicians who plant more rebellion with every burial, a commodity market they are cultivating for a ripe harvest, a military budget surplus. May we desire more than this blood & dust, the burial plot allotment of national myths.