NECROPOLIS
“Racial capitalism is the equivalent of a giant necropolis.
It rests on the traffic of the dead and human bones.”
-Achille Mbembe
~
By the end of the twentieth year
of the third millennium after someone may
or may not have been birthed, someone of umber
skin and opal eyes that would henceforth be
purified to mother-of-pearl, someone in the long-dead
and desiccated straw of an idealized
hay manger amid simple creatures with cloven
hooves, a manger aglow in golden
rays and the sheen from velvety robes, burgundy
and indigo, suffused with frankincense and myrrh
that waft right off the magazine page
.
By the end of the aforementioned year
in the Age of Abomination and QAnon
they were putting the finishing touches, the last pour
of concrete, upon the Necropolis, resting
as it were on the traffic of the dead.
The hue of this traffic, these accumulating bones,
is always one of the known knowns.
.
Somewhere there is a seashore receding.
Somewhere a canister is flung.
Somewhere a star shines down.
Somewhere a child fingers a toy gun.
Somewhere a teenager tries to walk home.
.
The truth about traffic: It grows
until a Grand Smelting reformulates all.
Will one Necropolis be enough?
An Abolition 2.0 has been proposed, shouted
from the barricades, past umbrellas, leaf blowers,
trashcan lid shields.
.
Upon returning to Earth, astronauts
have remarked that the silence of the bones
can be heard from outer space.
.
-Kim Goldberg
Pig Squash Press 