[extreme environments]

Paige Webb

Defense Supply Chain

When I imagine a map, the straight and scraggly lines are made with en- dashes,

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which suggests an edge one could cut with a pair of scissors, or a space at which one could fold a new shape. It’s a suggestion. A suggestion that holds tensile presence: a limit and possibility for air between.

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Within the lines of a state, in a city, I live on Livingston Ave. I am facing it now. Two rows of houses the street divides, a border between school districts. Walk across the south side: liquor store, morgue, gas stations, pawn shop, plywood storefront where glass once was. Five blocks east: one of the highest death rates in the city. The military defense supply. Five blocks north: boutique coffee shop, artesian gift shop, independent movie theatre, white people, white people, hedges, hedges.

I find the world untranslatable.

I do not want to make metaphors anywhere here that conflate abstractions with lived realities. If I do, please don’t forgive me.

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Let’s say it is you who lives

at Maryland Ave. and James Rd.

and step out your front door

                                                 daily                                      

to see smell feel military daily

Humvees camouflaged, tanks uncamouflaged

through long stretches of barbed wire fence

where I thought was the front entry, it’s only the backyard of

                                           Defense Supply Chain // an installation

barbed wire fence

                     barbed                  cars          

                     wire                  cars           spruce

                   fence                     cars           

             barbed                  cars          spruce

                 wire                  cars

[traffic flows in both directions]

clover spindly through

stones the size of fists

stone I pocket

[traffic flows in both directions]

2024, 1,400 weapons systems

6.7 million order / year

$3.5+ billion sales

synergy: state, federal

defense operations

Closed Entry Visitors:

No Weapons

WWII, a house for

400 prisoners of war

In 1990, a new installation:

end-to-end supply chain

I never see workers there.

Field Notes

Columbus has one of the highest rates in the nation of fatal shootings by its police force.

five hundred and ten acres of land, home to:

office buildings (sleek)                      parking lots (multiple)                      courtyard (pristine)

golf course (a golf course)               hotel (four stars!)                               storage units (total weapons supply)

five hundred + ten acres

           (barbed lines)

    = nearly a zip code

           Defense Supply Center Columbus

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Not “my” home echoes my historical traces—

My photo archive traces mistakes of capture:

fabric of red sweater, inner lining of a wool coat.

Cities not abstract. Actual metal beams, lit up ads shimmer on the sides of buildings, the rise-rise flats continually shift upward while you’re not looking, cities in which I buy coffee in white paper cups;

I make myself sick.

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Definition of definition:

1.  An abstraction; when imposed, dangerous to some who live.

It snowed here and there, in the aftermath. Officers  gear up

riots in a sharp February. A snowscape blinds the depth of field.

Extractable tension, systems of control, this pressure gauge.

Elinor Ann Walker