the serpent at orient’s pearl.

the city first appears as cartilage,

deep ruby scales tinted by children writhing on top of the ground,

like twisted marionettes convulsing under a dimmed proscenium.

its vertebrae glittering with patrol lights; 

flicker, 

flicker,

phosphorescent pupils that blink

whenever a chant rises above the pavement.

avenues hinge like a colossal spine,

curving around the onyx, serpentine chest of the plaza square.

flesh is liquified into carmine pools, saturated and cold;

severed limbs undergo metamorphosis into

municipal banners.

where crowds once braided their voices, there is only

a polished palimpest of stone,

and written on,

and scoured, 

and rewritten,

until the script of struggle thins

to rumor beneath the municipal gloss.

an unseen serpent moves in policy spirals.the sinew loosten, but the tattered memorandum tightens;each clause loops back, double-knotted,a jurisprudence of suffocation.you do not hear it coil. you notice onlyhow suddenly your sentences lack air,how even a whisper arrives pre-redacted.

vermiculated shield over bleeding knives, arm-of-the-state.tighter. tighter. stone articulates around my shoulder,its jasper, ragged skin is a sleepless architecture.i wrench against the grip, desiring to slaughter that veneerso that my pen may finally touch vellum.ink trembles at the lip of its reservoiranxious to become testimony, to ossify into bone-scriptyet the summons arrives: silence, countersigned as order.

my fingertips press into the grand army, unpenetrated latticework,a regiment of anonymous ribs beneath the plaza.though my hands cry auburn rivers across the marble,seeping into each hairline fissure,i can, for an instant, feel the city’s pulse misstep.coils snapping my neck; joints crying out requiemstheir staccato a rumbling of internal bells.screams taste metallic on my tongue,a bittersweet frequency lodging in the soft palate.

i had wished my throat a knife,to sever this hollowbreath noose blooming at my larynx;but the only blades that remainare the sharp edges of a shattered mausoleum.the serpent loops itself along its fractured crown,spine over stone, glyph over sarcophagus,talons—no, scales—inscribing censored vowelsinto nameless marble. each gouge a redacted consonant,each crack a footnote erased before it’s written.

archives rise behind it like paper necropolises,shelves stacked with meticulously embalmed facts.inside, redactions blossom like moldblack rectangles spreading quiet contagionacross dates, coordinates, names,until history resembles a charred field of omissions.outside, the atmosphere tastes of recidivist smoke:burned documents, burned lungs,indistinguishable on the tongue.

my epitaph is spit onto weeping willows,too dead to die again.they’ll flake my scalp to skin, burn the rest of my decomposing parchment,revel in my curling ash thickened by the charcoal airash refusing to remain decorous, to lie inert.under the flagstones, something unsettled stirs:bone-dust rearranging in clandestine patterns,a backbone aligning into a new scriptno censor yet knows how to decipher.

when thunder moves across the bruised rooftops,the plaza’s buried ribs answer in percussion;thunder begets echo, echo begets thunder—an anadiplosis of unrest.perhaps remembrance survives here not in marble,nor in sanctioned textbooks,but in the covert choreography of matter:stone misremembering its orders,flags forgetting which blood they borrowed,and one smuggled syllable escapingthe constriction of a guarded throat

to lodge, indestructible,in the city’s inner ear,so that we remember the square,and the square remembers us.