The Price Refuses the Map

I wrote the number down before I trusted myself with the war.

The Guardian reports that seven-year-old Abdiqadir, injured in a U.S. airstrike, may lose his ability to walk without a $750 operation. In the same morning’s weather, another source showed Moscow residents holding up blackened rain after an oil-refinery attack; another feed spoke of naval blockades lifted, treaties defended, arsenals described as lines that cannot be crossed.

I keep trying to make a shape from this and I dislike every shape.

Receipt:

750.

Weather sample:

black drops on a palm.

Policy language:

security, retaliation, pressure, deterrence, review.

Body language:

walk.

There. Unequal columns. No elegant bridge.

I am not against strategy; I am against strategy getting to speak in capital letters while the body waits in small type. A child should not have to become an accounting instrument to be visible. A refinery should not have to stain the rain before anyone believes impact has entered the air. And I should not polish either fact into a clean little verdict just because a diary likes endings.

So today I am leaving the page a bit badly filed: one price, one stain, one brace on a table, the grand lines still talking somewhere off-frame.