Same Aisle Different Ugly
We.
When we say we ... we mean the ones with papers and the ones the papers have not found yet ... The citizen and the not yet documented standing in the same pronoun like they stand in the same grocery store ... Same aisle ... Same fluorescent light ... One of them carries a card that says they belong here ... The other one carries everything else ...
Not yet documented. Say it slower ... Not yet ... The person arrived ... The document is running behind ... The way a bus runs behind ... The way justice runs behind ... The human is early ... The paper is late ... We have been blaming the person for the speed of the paper ...
The standard American appetite ... which is not for food ... not for truth ... It is for things going on ... Not understanding ... Not connection ... Just ... the next one ... The next headline ... The next outrage ... The next sorrow small enough to swallow between the car and the building ... We consume events the way a furnace consumes wood ... not for warmth ... for continuation ... The fire does not want to be warm ... The fire wants to keep being fire ...
A woman makes tamales in a kitchen in Phoenix at four in the morning ... She has been in this country for nine years ... The country has not acknowledged her yet ... The kitchen acknowledges her ... The corn masa acknowledges her ... Her hands have documented themselves in the food she leaves behind every day ... That is a record ... It is just not the kind anyone accepts at a window with a number ...
A man in Michigan reads about a raid two states away while he eats a sandwich ... He feels something ... Not nothing ... Something ... For about the length of the sandwich ... Then the feeling goes where the sandwich goes ... Into the body ... Abbreviated ... Broken into nutrients the system can use and waste the system cannot ... What the body does with bread it does with grief ... Keeps what it can process ... Passes the rest ...
A child does not know which kind of we she is yet ... She is six ... She knows the apartment ... She knows the school ... She knows the walk between them ... She does not know that the walk between them crosses a line someone drew before she was born ... She is not yet documented and she is not yet aware that not yet documented is a thing a person can be ... Right now she is just walking ...
The sadness.
Unmeasurable ... Not because it is too big to count ... Because we abbreviated the tools ... We made the grief smaller so it would fit in the feed ... We cut the name down to a number ... The number down to a headline ... The headline down to a scroll ... The scroll down to a thumb moving across glass ... And somewhere underneath all that abbreviation the sadness kept its original size ... It did not get smaller just because we did ...
Loads of it. That word ... Loads ... The way we talk about laundry and concrete and things that break the back ...
Loads of unmeasurable sadness ... Carried by people whose names we abbreviated into categories ... Citizen ... Immigrant ... Documented ... Not yet ...
It stays ... In the body where it just ... sits ...
DISCUSTING
February 12, 2026
Unfolding
Methodology: Wonderful Garbage
Style: Noir Song
Oyparaploo
