To be transparent
is not to vanish. As a child, I
was given a clear plastic woman. Inside her were hard liver, colon,
heart, and lungs; I pulled her apart from head to foot and took her
organs out, then replaced them, snapping
her body shut. She was all
organs; there was no plastic mind to let her look back
at my skin. Omran, age five,
sits on a plastic orange chair at the back of an ambulance; he wears
the dust of ancient Aleppo on his freshly cut hair, and he fidgets.
He's a window
in a house of windows. Unable to respond to this world, the
Muselmanner packed up their
eyes and left. The eye's
transparencies cannot sustain so much. They
close by staying fixed.
--18 August 2016
[Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy, 260]
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