Flags parade. Voices char. All fires hurry to ash, back to a silent gray earth, back to bullets pressed into a boy’s palm; a choice that is not really a choice at all. Just another slow-moving dawn & birds of prey break it like bones & everything seems worthless in its own way; brief & therefore wondrous. Men with eyes like windows with all the lights shut off & their own dead to attend to or atone for or both & a land that’s trying so hard to speak with its tongue cut out.