HoleyMoleyLand

is a place we all pass through (of violence, of revelation) with grand opening flags strung above fenced-in lots & railroad crossings.

Holy is the ___________ _______________ almighty.

And we inscribe the darkest days of history on our own bodies, sometimes invisibly—the way skateboarders carve asphalt & metal—& sometimes we open our shirts and say look

at this door caught in a hail of bullets, pockmarked; my heart

beats a tattoo in my chest: a knocking rat-tat-tat; the body is impenetrable, save through desire or violence. So it came to pass

that over the decades, some survivors played their faded numbers in the lottery or used them as passwords. & this

is our encrypted language of suffering, of protection. We are surrounded by an emptiness filled with signs.

I ask my son what he would do if someone came to his school with a gun.

I would take my friends and hide, he says. I would be very quiet.

My son, whom I carried that long summer, through the chalked & blood-soaked streets of Southeast tucked into my body.

My body: burnt-edged chipboard construction, tyvek paper torn & flapping in the wind against a plywood frame stamped with a manufacturer’s imprint.

The security guards ask us to remove everything from our pockets—even lint.

& here is the officer who says, “God creates the forgetfulness so we can forget.”

Holy is ______________’s name.

& here is the Secret Annex, the moveable bookcase that served as the door & entrance to the family’s hiding place. My innards:

tufted insulating foam cut into shapes of billboards, highway overpasses, fast food marquees—a dense pink thicket held together with roofer’s nails & highway pylons.

& here are the sounds of the shooting range up the road: a series of echoes that sweep the dust, tilt the evergreens slightly

into silence-blank-silence-blank, then air—for a moment before the crack of the board’s wheels hitting pavement again. Another body

in motion, a vulnerable flesh. Our ubiquitous yet easily overlooked emblems of transient existence are heaped one on top of the other, as in a landfill, giving the place an air of neglect.

Holy is the _______________ of _________________.