Jericho II

It’s trauma theory for the televised era, feasting on the sight of the women cowering in their rubbled homes, and the serious men, with their weapons of war, and their cartographies of feeling!,

But occupation is more a convalescence, an indigo bloom that works slowly, seeping into a water that tills the soil, hydroponic for the crops, that washes the faces, barbiturate on a skin now cleaned of its inconvenience!,

And if acclimation is just another death, then it is also cyanotrophic, metabolizing our unease, casting us about in search of our riverbed bodies, noting the stomach bloated, the neck a dark bruise-blue,* confirming those solemn vows to bury the houses amongst the ferns of the Jordan River the serious men