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Meat is er is sin

I wrote just before (oh the sweetest and ers Of concentrations But only after that night with Pyotr Duda and the roast gannet stuffed with plu else before That dark red and black wildness, that sleekness, the teeth Soone Scooped away as cleanly as a ers at the sa The giraffes, too—oh, we’ve called theiraffes as I understand giraffes: black and spindly and tall, four legs, hungry forever But they were soiraffes

Soht

Do you knohat the Ossuary calls us? The people of Aerograd Our Lady says it too, we have heard it in her addresses They call us Aeroular All our thousands are to the mouse in the works of the city A creature other than the dirt and disease behind it And as they say it, it groard truth As they becoether, a hundred le humpbacked shape You can see the away like tails Their dark shapes move like mountains behind the clouds One day, perhaps, there will be only one of us and one of her

When they speak, the tigers and the giraffes and the Ossuary and Our Lady, I am almost certain their whole speech isother than they are Even Aerograd Their tongues are tigers that are not tigers What is it they are saying that we cannot hear? What did we call the occupation before occupation? What did we call Our Lady?

Fifth: Why do they call it an occupation? Is not the point of an occupation to convert the occupied population into the occupiers’ iraders, Our Lady’s children Aeroe, we understand ourselves only according to Aerograd, only in hoe intersect with this place where we live together along with the tigers and giraffes and propellers and luannets stuffed with plums

Tradition, maybe A joke, maybe

Where we say occupation there is a line through the twenty-five Districts and six levels of Aerograd On one side of the line stands Our Lady with her beauty and her colors, flanked by her anieless, all those hands, all those mouths On the other side we sit No matter how quiet we becoe so that the language e born is not our own but hers, but theirs, it cannot be avoided that Our Lady is other than we She puts out her hands and we disappear into the about her business in our bones

We call it an occupation because we are occupied We are occup

ied because we call it an occupation We cannot call them countrymen—or at least they would never apply that word to us

They seem to like the tere of the world with all the rest

/////: I have heard it said that there is no single Our Lady Pyotr Duda believed them a species, perhaps thousands, but at least hundreds, in nuht that we never see the saners will never visit) cannot see the variegated clouds, cannot call them by their names, so we cannot see the difference between Our Ladies We are too used to our own faces The one who speaks in the Ossuary is not the one who unexisted my mother is not the one that whispers on the radio is not the one who opens the year at the University croith steel laurels

We must have come here from somewhere The clouds today are pure white puffers I used to call theh Seas We must have come here from somewhere because we are not suited to this environs, the altitude kills one out of every twenty or thirty of us, our eyes have grown accustoan to help us along Aerograd is a city in the sky, and we are not of the sky But they—or she—cannot be from the same place that made us Our Lady came from somewhere else Perhaps Our Lady does not mean God, but is their collective term for the repeated body they use Perhaps that is how little influence we have ever had on her, compared with how like her we try to become Either she never dies or she is multiform Does it matter?

We were an Academy Town We were asseas but smoke Not a liar but an altimeter

I expect the fifth section of this docued I veer too far To encode with any density is to lose the sense of which is the real annet or did I annet in Pyotr?