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you can’t remove the city but you can use all the words you know. the tense you can conjugate. you can put the concrete in the image. the back of the bone is what you say behind the crack of your teeth. that is your only plausible tongue. the city won’t translate it for you. to rename any of these words constitutes betrayal. you’ll get it cut off. get it gouged out. don’t dare make this a junkyard, where the teeth empty out refrigerator motors, where they lay stabbed and cut up. their puffy corpses all along lawnmower yards. someone at this point will undoubtedly point out the heidelberg. and they will think it is the only art here that ever burned at the stake, got murdered on the sidewalk by too many colors. this city sky. here, at the bus stop, tell ’em. capitol park is touching you. it parts your ankles dirty. it is stuck in the oil between cornrows. here is your three-ring griswold and washington. it smells of vaseline. you miss your father, don’t you. this city spit him up. 60 ...

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