May 2021

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[text ID: I had obligations: hope, but hope negates the experience. I owe myself nothing. /end ID]

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[text ID: We knocked the heads off the statuary, deprived the landmarks of any meaning. Victory swelling in the occupation. History is painted by the winners. Keep your paints wet. Trust me, I have things to say. /end ID]

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[text ID: Let me tell you a story about war. A man says to another man Can I tell you something?  The other man says No. A man says to another man There is something I have to tell you. No, says the other man. No, you don’t. /end ID]

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[text ID: I like dead things, says the landscape. They cannot hurt me. /end ID]

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[text ID:  Its roots in the ground and its branches in the air, a tree is pulled in two directions. /end ID]

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[text ID:  A boy spills a glass of milk and his father picks him up by the back of the shirt and throws him against the wall. You killed my wife and you can’t even keep a glass on the table. The wife had died of sadness, by her own hand. The father walks out of the room and the room is almost empty. /end ID]

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They went to the museum and wandered the rooms. He saw a painting and stood in front of it for too long. It was a few minutes before she realized he had gotten stuck. He was stuck looking at a painting. She stood next to him, looking at his face and then the face in the painting. What do you see? she asked. I don’t know, he said. He didn’t know. She was disappointed, then bored. He was looking at a face and she was looking at her watch. This is where everything changed. There was now a distance between them. He was looking at a face but it might as well have been a cabbage or a sugar beet. Perhaps it was something about yellow near pink. He didn’t know how to say it. Years later he still didn’t know how to say it, and she was gone.

from War of the Foxes by Richard Siken