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But this is small. Exhaustion multiplies. Street theater, an empty stadium. A player throws a baseball high in the stands where no one retrieves it. The old warehouse was where one vendor's father collected unemployment; today the vendors didn't bark. No drinks, no popcorn, no cracker jacks. Just absence of riot in absence of person. As if. I told my student not to use the word “just,” but it's just the word for what's missing. Freddy Gray dying in the back of a van stopping one time more than we knew. So much we don't know, the not peeling like lead paint from walls of apartment blocks. That was not spinal surgery: a not cinder block crushed his larynx. It's his not speaking we hear. He wrote about a fragile door. Ours to occupy this limen, or sidewalk whose cracks mark meaning that cannot matter. What is just surpasses it.

--30 April 2014