On the first night after the riots we don’t know
that it is the first night after the riots, and we are insane.
Our biologist consults her notes, her sketches of opossums
(Didelphis virginiana) and painted ladies (Vanessa virginiensis). She declares
that perhaps the fascists have a point: no-one as small as ourselves
could live, should live, can live. Something to do with square cubes,
something else to do with symbol or allegory. Our navigator is drunk,
having found the Listerine. His vomit is blue and mentholated.
On the first night after the riots
we don’t know anything
so we know everything.
We know that roving gangs still rove
looking for stragglers and beating them
with broom handles in parking garages.
We know that a tiny housing development
is being menaced, that members of
the John Brown Gun Club had to stop guarding it
and leave because state cops
are confiscating firearms.
We know that the poem advances
fitfully, the facts and forms changing
minute by minute as we write it
and edit as we erase it as we live it.
We know that we are alive
when other people are dead
and this makes us insane.
Jen is talking to the frolicksome maids on a group call, she is explaining
why she was there and they keep shifting the italics in their answers.
“But why were you there?” “But why were you there?” “But why…”
She holds me tight in her fist and keeps me out of the picture.
I think of how we watched the dead, the permanently fucked,
the temporarily fucked, the unfucked but fucked enough, we watched them all
taken away by friends and police and ambulances and by the other fucked up people.
An hour later we walked a block away to see tiny prep cooks and barbacks
from the restaurants dragging debris away. The restaurants had set
their tables outside again. Waitrons floated in various degrees of dissociation
from smiling patron to smiling patron while a tiny host tried to scrub
skid marks and blood from the bricks under their feet, and they too,
the staff, the tables, the food, the drinks, the world and all its faces are insane
and the navigator is moaning now, something about body heat and surface area.
Size Writes 