Under pretense of we a community is founded as defense against an unspoken fear, and that horror is transferred to the abject other, now negated––not people, but the walking dead.
Where those ties might bind you get knotted pathologies instead, twisted clusters of defensive narcissisms woven into founding myths. Birth of a nation. The flags of fathers. The fathers dead, now get the children. Act fast.
What compulsion. Repeat, loop, repeat. A regression to psychotic repression defined by disconnection from reality.
With each return of this plague, the hold on the symbols that held us slips away and the virus turns inward, consuming its host.
We remember. But. What is memory? One asks and soon forgets again, each verse of a poem emerging from the fertile black lines it erases rising anyway to sing from beneath the feet of us gathered at the burial grounds, of this what of those we never––did
what we
would
not––
yet
***
Informed by the work of Noelle McAfee
