5 October 2020
The nation’s a
side effect: aggression, agitation, anxiety, blurred vision,
irritability, mood changes, trouble thinking, speaking or walking,
troubled breathing at rest.* Side effects are character actors;
they’re loud and shine the light of their skin
through the kliegs. Nie mehr Krieg was scrawled across a
building in Munich, near the packed McDonald’s where I took myself out of
the rain. My mother told me lamps were made of skin and I tried to imagine how. It was as hard to see as sex. She had a light spoon with a swastika on it, kept with her other spoons. We never seemed to use it, but
it was always there inside the drawer. Her brother had
given her a lamp; the shade spooked me, as did all the others. Made
of synthetic flesh, the shades proved translucent, like x-rays of a history
she knew but I did not. We’re turning the corner, the president
tells us, but corner nests so close to coroner I can’t believe him. It
comes around, like the woman on the mountain, like a theory of
history that counts only its repetitions. At some point, detail is
both fine and abstract, as if the thing were the law that made
it so. My neighbor leans to pick up plumeria blossoms under the
tree; many have fallen on their petal backs, gazing up from weed-whacked
grass, visible after divorce from the tree’s branches.
Beneath the controlled art, a scattered one. More out of whack is
this: “I love that man; I would die for that man; that man
is my hero!” They're not citizens, but fans. The star drives by, his eyes peering over a black mask. It’s a
crazy ball, but we’re invited to come again. The balls of his eyes
are marbles, reflecting nothing but thick glass.
*side effects of Dexamethasone
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