The central project is done. Double done, like double dutch, difficult. Consider the word “liquidate.” To make a solid flow is to throw it out. To wear a sandwich board advertising your own demise or that of the business paying you. It’s a brief gig. You're the meat in a sandwich board; advertising's the bread. They’re out of lettuce and tomato, so all you get is watery delirium.
The central project returns to concept, having run its course of material. What I threw out my back on is now vision’s after-taste. Looking back, I saw the Sodus sign not as a welcoming, but as a marker of what was being gone. You can take a bus out of state, the legislator said, to get your abortion, or you can stand in front of a mirror, with yourself for company, while you take a pill. To be a woman is to be an illegal.
To grieve the material stands in for a less solid state of mourning. What's fleeting dances off-screen, performs a jig of farewell, invites post-mourning excess. She eases the trauma of others, but its contagion reaches its octopus hands back for her. You have to create firm boundaries, a friend says, but where boundary itself was what was broken, the portal’s a jagged hole in a chain link fence. Aunty Portal’s responsible for your safe passage in both directions, but she can’t choose for you. She leans on her pink bike with tassels on the handlebars, holding out her oil-smudged arms, midwife.
Forget books; complete the digital transfer. Words no longer disintegrate on paper left in a forest to measure rates of decay, artistry. The loss of pixels feels lighter, almost as if your words blinked back at you, wanting something. Lilith, when I leave, stands on the arm of a couch and turns her brown eyes on me. What does she know of guilt, except how to compose it in another?
Aunty Portal is not responsible for postage, especially between countries. Her wealth comes not in payment but in the promise of another state. On this side of the fence, a beaten dirt path; on the other, a tangle of mangroves, punctuated by tents and pallets. The homeless are not permitted pleasure, though we suspect they find it beneath their tarps. As difficult to imagine as sex between one’s parents. Abandoned by capital, we follow, afraid to make eye contact. I-contact with you makes a contract, or so we fear. Feeling contracts. We sign the dotted line, then crumple the paper up, or hit delete. Those are not the same act, are they?
The drone operator suffers for what she imagines she’s done. Even when she hears the news of his death, she can only imagine herself as its instigation. She’s cut off from act, from image, from everything but the thought of what she’s done. The pilot who’d survived a bombing run on the ground couldn’t drop his bombs so easily after. A small girl had run into a large pipe for cover. To earn one’s keep as a psychopath for the state means you act as one. Acting precedes becoming. It is not becoming to kill, even if it’s currently in fashion.
Criminals and models walk the runway. The former president spits on every precedent. He’s not on a bus or in a plane. He’s not riding a bicycle or catching an uber. He bears no cross that he doesn't invent at the moment of his self-proclaimed crucifixion. Sabotage the change of state, throw a wrench in metamorphosis. Even the literal cannot be imagined.
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