Performed by Val Cole
—–
Neutralize
They arrive faceless,
as if shame were standard issue.
Vans idle.
A neighborhood becomes a diagram.
The public word is enforcement.
The private one is containment.
In the desert, tents flower—
soft-sided, seventy-two to a bloom.
Toilets flood rice with sewage.
Water tastes metallic, instructional.
A mother at an airport
learns the grammar of absence:
no food,
no water,
no sky.
Her daughter folds inward
like a closing book.
They call it civil.
They call it procedure.
History calls it rehearsal.
At Fort Bliss—
where the enemy once had a face—
a boy turns off a light
and wakes in an ambulance.
A body becomes leverage:
fingers tightening
where refusal lives.
Thirty-two dead in a year.
Four more before January settles.
One ruled homicide
in solitary confinement—
as if loneliness were not already lethal.
“Poisoning the blood,”
the phrase travels cleanly.
What do we do with poison?
We neutralize it.
Neutralize:
to render inert.
To make lifeless.
To subtract breath from belonging.
There are those who imagine
a gentle subtraction of millions.
But mass removal has a sound.
It is a child crying
into government bedding.
It is a fist correcting
a refusal to disappear.
It is a country rehearsing
how to forget its own reflection.
Inside the tents
people whisper their names
like contraband.
I am not poison.
I am not blood to be purified.
I am a body with a sky in it.
That is what will not neutralize.
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