The Most Concrete Imaginary

I always drink cranberry juice on flights.

They say it washes out your insides.

I watch the map, too. 

In, then out of sleep 

my eyes focus on the inching red line

and then open to its surroundings.

Let me go everywhere.

Along the red marking that runs across the map

Like the clean cut of an autopsy across the earth

Maybe that's what the world needs.

If you open us up what will you find?

Besides corpses corpses

The millions of our manacled and manifested dead. 

Our acknowledged and unacknowledged tragedies

just underfoot.

All ground might be hallowed ground.

I want to go everywhere, but how do I trod?

Perhaps every moment is like standing at Sachsenhausen 

seventy years later

On the most perfect cloudless blue October day

The land does not know what it has wrought

The trees do not remember what they saw

Only the human living are left with that heart-thud shiver

The irony of historical memory

Still…take me through. 

I am hungry for peanuts and sadness

While out my little porthole the sky glows until it is all afire.

Eyes blinded, skin burning, I hide behind the shade

Back to the rendered world where nose and tail straddle borders out of scale.

The sun rises and sets upon millions of lines and fissures.

The plane zooms over them unabated

Because they are only visible on the map or not visible at all.

A border is the most concrete imaginary ever imposed.

Just let me go everywhere.

I always drink cranberry juice on flights

They say it washes out your insides.