nationbuilding

I am running out of hairs to pluck from beneath my bottom lip, he says.

Stop doing that then I like those hairs, she says.

Pin ports wave their little flags of dust like neutral nations proud of their stout indifference. Connotations and misnomers and waiting room chairs with left-for-dead issues of something non-confrontational, something unwilling to gaze at a stance-taking. Next, please.

I need another cerveza so I will have another cerveza. In some other life, it could have been me. My drawstring is pulled much too tight.

My trusses have lapsed, my walls grown thin. Safety zones re-rendered like shelled out expanses of some old country's no-man-land, vast and dead. The nets designed to catch all of those falling things are muddied and mournful.

The tilde curl above their letters like the robust, cloud-borne flags of those polarized states that exist in every rotation of the bumpy globe, an orb where the Himalayas and the Andes read like Braille expressions of both love and regret.