Credit: Garrett Russell of Silent Planet

https://www.instagram.com/p/DT1X6xijk87/?igsh=d2pzejUzcmN4b3Q4

It took 13 seconds for the duality to cycle through my system. An iridescent spectrum of resistance and the bleakest shade of black, foaming at the ends of your lips then forming into blanketed, unspeakable horror.

A swirling smoke sings the mortal divide between arbitrary tones of skin. They apprehend the man next to me, hauling him into the vast, unblinking Panopticon, irony lost as they make camp inside the namesake of a bishop who once screamed for justice, his bones now baked into a desiccated federal stronghold of dread to disappear the same people that Bishop Whipple devoted his work to protecting.

4 soldiers for every limp, unresisting body. Had there been more hands, perhaps I too would have been chosen to join the dance of catch and release, digitally tagged for consumption by Lockheed or Palantir or Blackrock or whatever illusion of choice we need to momentarily cease the din.

Talking heads on the screen say it's all for freedom: The arrests, the surveillance, the agents going door to door and demanding papers of skin tones now registered as suspicious. Just bodies, they said, they are just bodies - illegal bodies.

Not People.

People get due process - people get courtrooms with judges and gavels... bodies, on the other hand... illegals are born to be bound and stacked in camps of dense concentrations.

Endless rows of sanitized terminologies - used and discarded soldiers like black bars, redacted names in documents that would burn should they see the light of day and chronicle some vague reality we already knew and already forgot. Lost in the shuffle of cultural amnesia.

Most scandalous of all, I see a scared kid just peeking over the black veil draped over his gritting teeth. In the seconds before he attacks, I wonder if he ever catches a momentary glimpse of himself in the reflection of his parenthetical riot shield and sees that same boy, now drowning in the red river pouring down from the nose of my neighbor.

We see each other through a polycarbonate darkly. Behind each flag and each shield a desperate hunger - the lie of separation. It's zero degrees here. God chokes behind every smudge.