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You are magnified among Angels and men: you are street view on google earth, swiveling up and down a street whose origin is a stop sign. The symbol for magnifying glass isn't one, though it serves the same purpose. My youth a field of dead metaphors on which I click my mouse, or touch the screen as if it were skin, tattooed. Pencils are old technology, but good symbolism. They travel better than hostages in a freezer locker, or a policewoman on her beat. The old Paris priest held a sign that named the dead, all of them. We know the killers by their videos. One brother picked up a sneaker from the street. It was an act of volition so small it fascinates. Another man sat beside a book case in which four books lean. I cannot read their spines, see only white paint, an otherwise bare room, a man in a black jacket beside a Kalishnikov. Testimony before the fact that cancels it.

--11 January 2015