“Abuse and neglect share a category” is an ontological claim
but it could be read as just: what are abuse and neglect
doing now? (They are sharing a category. I see.) What are they doing
walking hand in hand on this street, under a sun cranked
and grinding its teeth and burning far too hard? They have been seen
at Reconciliation Park, née Lee Park, where the police are falling asleep.
“You are too small to be here,” says Jen. Is that an ontological claim?
Is the basic fact of my existence how small I am, how out of place
in a sea of Brobdingnagian sweat? Is that why they want me here,
is that why they want us here, we tiny little fuckers who deserve our rights:
to remind themselves that we should be here, but they should be here even more?
Or is it to remind themselves that we are only smaller versions
of themselves, to remember that we only exist in relation to them,
that there is a time and place for us that they have kindly donated?
“You are too small to be here,” says Jen but she makes no motion
to take us away. Here we flare in a furnace of allegory.
Here we are all on fire, laughing flames dancing, around us
and through us, it’s only the fascists with their barnacle eyes
and their clutched-pearl lips who cannot burn, who will not burn,
their dull tautological lives damply inflammable. And I don’t know
what “an ontological claim” is, what it means, not at all.
“You are too small to be here,” says Jen. Oh, so are you, love,
and I do love you, all sixty-four feet of you. Because they will
shrink you too. Because everyone must be shrunk until they can be
crushed in one hand, crushed and smeared on the wall like a toddler
drawing on the bathroom tile with their own shit. Because
a state of emergency has been called. Because the police
are modelling ‘awake’ now. Because the tacky silver car
creeps onto 4th Street, stops and surveys the crowd, tastes the air.
The tacky silver car backs up the half block to Main Street
and launches itself forward, in the exonerative tense, towards the crowd.
The giant street medic, white-lipped, brave, afraid, is covered
with blood. Jen reaches for her. Jen doesn’t know she has gripped me
so hard that it dislocates my shoulder, and neither do I.
The medic reaches for her walkie talkie and broadcasts to nobody.
“They killed her.” On the other end, I reply, I am in Jen’s hand
and I am in Jackson Park, I am in the rear with the gear,
staring at a receiver, I am an explorer a cartographer
so small, I am just another asshole handing out information
and orange slices and water, I am four blocks away, I am six inches tall, I am
six feet tall, I reply, “Please repeat,” and the giant medic with her giant hand
still on Heather Heyer’s giant dead shoulder says, “They killed her.”
Size Writes 