Organ of the state in crisis, vestigial node of ideology. Neon hemlock for the national rupture. We watch the change take shape in present tense, an anchor woman’s compunctual gloss of pent up emotion. Where the abstractions of daily life escape our collective memory, holding smart phones up to war crimes. Another mother mourns her disinheritance of earth. While the border shifts to Pennsylvania Avenue, the mark of masked badges taped with black skin, bloody library of Alexandria flooding Manhattan Square, Market Street in the furnace of reparations. Call it what it is, epistemological battle-field, unit of vainglory, upstart nation starved with spirit, deformed. Tunnel of libel, torrent of scripted campaign vivisection. A wall may form of teargas and billyclubs, but simple ignorance is quicker, cutting from the bloody stumps. impaired so not to run from slavery. What causes loss of consciousness.
I can’t breathe!
There’s a sure reason why nobody ever asks WHY when they visit China’s Great Wall, or the Roman ruins in Britain, or the division of Berlin. There needs be no discourse as such. Better to remember it was the help of Rahab who brought to Israel deliverance from Exodus through her liminal space. Yet we each carry the crimson cord of deviance in this lawless country. Stand in the quiet Jordan, then, and reflect upon what natural divisions keep us knotted. The porousness of certain injustices, which hang like a crimson wire on live feeds and censorship panels. White men whisper safety while a bullet’s etched in the Midrash, a coffin dance of narrative distortion, the death knell of anarchists.
Hollow, in the ancient timbre, regressive semiotics of sword and symbol. Haunted canary in the prison window, underground bunker, church of christ. Take a knee, and hold your breath, to better hear what’s coming.
“Walls have become an important cultural symbol. Although they are ubiquitous in other contexts, now ‘the wall’ has become synonymous with America’s southern border, and efforts to contain and militarize it. This brief prose poem explores the concept of borders as liminal space, filtered through the present moment and historical antecedents. Rahab, who was a sex worker and invaluable ally to the people of Israel, famously held a crimson cord out of her window. She lived within the walls of Jericho itself, an often forgotten detail of some importance (Joshua 2.15). A moment is given to reflect on the violence and cruelty seen from liminal spaces, and their historical recurrence.“