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Ethics.

"Lake Effect

Chionophilia: a longing for snow. Sirens
shatter through my windows, blue
and red, the color of a headache. Frontogenesis:

zones of air pressure and temperatures
strengthening. An hour ago,
I drove by the lake, waved past by police.

I’m not telling you anything
you can’t find out yourself. I live close
to what produces its own weather, warmth

desalinated into crystals
that melt the packed ice of our streets.
We use 20,000 pounds of lake salt

to clear them, scree and gravel; during storms,
my neighborhood gets constantly patrolled.
'I guess I’ll have to wait for snow,' is the next-

to-last-thing James, my neighbor, said,
manic, before the cop shot him.
It has not snowed in weeks. Ski resorts

make their own storms now, machines
groaning out thin flurries, though metal
cannot duplicate how lake water

thickens the crystals,
gives snow its 'body.'
Body is business. I’m not telling you

anything, James told the cop
who wanted his name, before
lunging at him with a plastic shovel.

They used to call this lake
Timpanogos, built the city
beside it because mountains form a bowl

that keeps all enemies
out. Everyone thinks there’s someplace
safe. I visited James’s house, once,

saw the dishes piled up, the thin-soled
boots ringed along his carpet.
Twenty-one days and the sky is dry.

Salt trucks sigh down empty streets.
It’s only the white
that keeps some people here, where snow

is work, a shovel means business. James
wanted to scrape his neighbor’s
snowless drive when the woman

called the cops about a peeping tom.
Not even stone is immune
to salt, which, mixed with sugar beet,

produces a solution that corrodes
vehicles, bridge decks, steel
plates. Do you see snow here?

The cop demanded. Symptoms of mania
include obsessiveness, aggression;
the sudden, inescapable belief

a man can clear the world of snow.
Herons fade into lake, white
on white, slicked into the grain

boundary where mist
turns everything to scuffed opal.
The cop wore a camera

strapped to his chest.
I watched from his body
the last footage of James pacing

back and forth, eyes
like burn holes. Over the course of time,
everything degrades. Even the lake

is shrinking, endorheic:
no water flows
in or out. Do you see snow?

James’s hand trembles in the video.
He pants, paces. For a moment,
it looks like everything

might be alright.
Then the cop demands,
again, his name.

I am not telling you anything
you don’t already know.
A hand, a shove, a shovel,

the video gone white.
There are not a thousand words for it,
in any language. How it looks

from above: a lake that’s dead
but shining. Blue and white,
and when the sun just hits it, red.

The mind, made too permeable
by its terrible particulates, cannot be policed.
What other word for stain? What word

for gone? There is a body and a color
and a grid of streets swept of white.
I am not telling you anything.

James wanted to be friends,
he told me once
as I watched him scatter seed

outside his house. Black
and yellow and red, the color of buntings
that migrate through the city each spring.

I like the white ones best,
James told me. And tossed some seed.
And the birds rose up around him in a circle.

--Paisley Rekdal in Orion Mag

The Red Tower.

"I translated this by Mahmoud Joudah:

The death of a girl means that a tree in the garden of heart has withered, that a major malfunction has struck the mood of the dawn, and that someone will sleep in an undying eclipse, will not perform his morning practices.

The death of a girl means that a dance has ceased forever, a song has gone astray, a laugh muted after which countless smiles will die out.

The death of a girl means that someone will walk in the streets on his own, eyes welled up, heavy-hearted, and too melancholic and about to weep people think he’s mad.

The death of a girl means there is a shortage in food for the impoverished, a raging thirst striking the throats of birds, a summer followed by no winter, and an everlasting arthritis in the joints of Time.

The death of a girl means that a poem will be unwritten, a painting will be unpainted, a love will be orphaned, an embrace will be postponed, and that there will be grief in a present tense that never stops."

--@MosabAbuToha

"Collecting these objects was both a passionate vocation and the enactment of a shared aesthetic."