The first image, a little girl’s body pulled out of the rubble,I strike from the poem. Let her rest. Language is a failed state.The second image my own body stripped and hung by my fingers,less their nails, piled neatly on a nearby table, I keep.The poem is a space to rehearse for the future.The third image a dictum of power. Something like “the state is” or“the Guggenheim-winning poet is.” This I soften and blur.In my weakest moments I still succumb to the desire for a book dealand avoid threatening its keepers.The fourth image rubble alone, pulled from the mouth of my bodyhanging from a hook in the black site. This image I widen so it envelopsthe entire page. Yellow bile coating the margins.I am interested in frightening you.I do not want to be alone anymore.The fifth image a drone giving birth to a child with gold leaf onits fingernails. I wipe the mucus off. I give it a name. At the edgeof the poem the baby slouches toward Jerusalem. When it crossesthe border the poem can no longer see it. The drone-child becomesan imagined condition the poem has released into the world.I do not know what it intends. I do not know what it will eat.The sixth image my father, dragged into the poem against his willonce more. I suspend him here with me. I revel in ourtogetherness. His nails join mine, our backs are cut, our eyes plucked out.The cruelty of jailers infected my language.Everything I love I turn to cruelty. The poem now is justanother cell. All I know is how to write us dead.Inside this image I reach out my little toeand touch the image of my father’slittle toe.The state iscruelerthan your poemever could be,I make the poemmake my father say.