war machine Archives

Singer to her Song

From a chasm

When the gods of the golden wars are done
pruning the immortal siege of us I hope to still
call after some bird of the unseen, come, I will
feed you through the yawning lull of an entire
day the wonder of its grace long taboo, a sin
hidden in shadows of imperial gaze, amid
the absolution of the drones, the least among
us long translated to the lesser of two knowns
a third way buried in the blast still calls with
breaking voice Time says to me, o Space I fast
become a body petrified in my eternity and I
admit I am a vapor now, the scent of displaced
selves nosing tracks along scorched earth we fell
to track this body back to knowing you before

that severed joint

What is Going

On breath

All that matters is–––what? Sometimes I cannot hear.

I want the children to be able to dream and breathe. I want their dreams for them, their breath, their dream breath back to them now, the winds restored where they were knocked out like a blow to the back. Sometimes at a birth a child will need to be reminded to breathe, but this is something else.

Sometimes at the death of children a collective body will need to be reminded back to collective breath.

It knocks now. Let some new wind be what this is, knocking back. Louder now. Everyone I see in passing in a workday says the same thing. I need to breathe we say to one another. A body deprived of oxygen will fade. A soul deprived of body will––what? Are these souls knocking about? Something knocks at my temples now. It will not stop. How are you? I ask the children, an opening ritual. Tired, they say. I am so tired.

These are our children. They are not breathing well.

All that matters is what will restore breath. All that matters is protection of breath, of dream. All that matters is rest for these knocking souls. We try to hold the thought.

Another round fires into the space again where we are trying, looking up, to remember a dream. Its noise pours over us like sand into our mouths.

For the Living and the Dead

Against the machine.

When the horror of a moment renders a body speechless, the acts of pen to page, brush to canvas, fingers to keys––become negotiations with death. Yours, mine: what are they and how do they relate? To account for whole cities of dead, a vast underground rendered invisible through banality. What is it to write a voice, paint a vision––while standing on ground in full recognition of the brothers beneath it, and the invisible sisters with their children and parents in mass graves? Welcome to the necropolis, says one, where screens herald the battalion.

What are the stakes at this scale? Life. Lives. Forget numbers, abstractions. Try instead: One.

One.

Each a brother, sister, mother, daughter, each with a scent of their own, a particular laugh and secret hopes––erased.

What is at stake? The human condition in the age of the war machine.

How to resist? The first act is naming.

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Inspired by the work of Juan Ruflo, Christina Rivera Garza, and Achille Mbembe.