from Startles

Startles

Kona storm: clouds scurry from the Koolau toward the ocean to the east; trees pronounce the wind before it arrives. I pronounce you and you pronounce me. The diary of a young girl appears in code, though “Jeffrey Epstein” looks clear enough, as if clarity had anything to do with it. She was made pregnant, the birth monitored by a woman dressed in blood; the baby was taken away. “From then on, her tone shifts permanently.”

From then on, she writes as if to gather artificial flower petals that fall on a cemetery road. If you can’t put the actual flower back together, then try the fake one. There’s less wilting, more willingness to be glued in place. We won’t ask the meaning of place, as flowers are less that than portions of one. I must remember to save my document, I tell the wind.

The horror is in their use of ordinary things: masks, pizza, ice cream, a pacifier. None of these are what they mean. Metaphor takes us to the hell of cackling rich men. You can find two bodies on the New Mexico ranch, one email says, its writer saving that information against legal cases. We don’t report crimes, we pass them on for bitcoin.

She went in a lamb and came out a lion, she wrote. Was her name redacted for safety, or pulled across the internet sky like an ad? “She’s available,” the future president was told. She was told what to eat, what to wear, how her teeth should look. The chair for dental work doubled as something we have no word for.

Or none that we shall say. “Did you get the torture video and did you like it?" The photographs I can’t forget are the still ones. Girls in white blouses and black skirts, dressed as if for Catholic school; from a stool, one reaches to take something from a cupboard. Her panties fall around her ankles, her face is black square.

A woman in a red dress screams about the smell of human flesh, after it was cooked and eaten. She disappeared. Girls’ frail voices ask where they’re being taken: Epstein and Pinker stare back at them. Girls play the part of the camera, taking it all in, never emerging from its chrysalis/lens. If you want to witness, click yes to “are you over 18?” on the government website.

I love Reznikoff, his testimonies, the gaps he left for us to fill. The gaps offered an ethics, the answer to why a Black man had been killed in a barn in the south. The gap is where we fell, and out of which we came clutching our bills of rights. Holocaust I couldn’t read past babies thrown in the air for target practice. No pacifiers there.

Now, as then, gaps can only tear fabric; no spools of thread can be had, only blindfolds. To have one’s eyes covered takes away our power to witness. I might see bodies fall from the sky if they’d not been redacted, twice hidden in limitless streams of words and photos. Documents without end, amen. Completion would be a form of justice.