United States of Abuse

Re-start. Fern shadows on the canic lead me to a Croatian-American mathematician, to Canadian Intelligence; or to an insult against one's sexual capability. We opened the door to find him abusing the child of our friend and we said nothing. We wrote about his attacks on us in dressing rooms, and he boasted to us about "pussy." The canic I refer to is building material, made of sugar cane. Half our house is made of it.


I put the word "leche" on the board, because it means milk and shit. I put the word "faggot" on the board because it means a bundle of sticks and a slur. The word is a grenade: cradle it, even without its pin, and it remains inert. Our neighbor pounded ceramics all day; fragments weigh down the sculptures he moved to support his roof. He hopes his neighbors don't think he's lost it.


Gardening is all about death. "Kill them all," Bryant says of the pigs who destroy forests. "A man after my own heart," responds our guest environmentalist. Feral ungulates provoke her wrath. On the road to Hilo, we see a truck pulling a group of cows. They look out soft-eyed between bars. The Big Island sells a lot of beef, Bryant says. He doesn't eat mammals because their eyes remind him of his own. She won't soon forget the hurt in his eyes after she told him of the whisper campaign.


The bird that hangs from our ceiling flaps its wings. Its eye turns toward me, and then away, and then around to the other side. It's mostly blue, with a red beak. Not a native bird, but a wooden one. The living ones scatter when you walk toward them, small bursts of yellow or red. Bryant's dad got a photograph of a baby sitting in the road. The others had flown.


The bird's wings are attached to strings attached to a wooden bar attached to more string attached to the narrow beam on the ceiling. "I know why the caged bird sings," an old black man named Lincoln typed to my mother after she left the rich old woman's employ.


This is not about singing; it's about abuse.


An accidental witness sees bodies on the road, turkey vultures at work, sees a man and his toddler face down in the Rio Grande. An accidental refugee drives her nearly drowned car and anxious cat out of New Orleans to the panhandle. The storm organizes into a preposterous grievance against her, advancing with the dumb force of bureaucracy. After 35 employees of France Telecom died by suicide, their bosses were put on trial for "moral harassment." Pelosi refuses to impeach.