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 called Columbus, I live on Livingston Ave.

I am facing it now. Two rows of houses the street divides, a border between

school districts. Walk the line’s west side: liquor store, morgue, gas stations,

pawn shop, plywood storefront where glass once was. Walk # blocks east: the

greenspace I call dearest. The military defense supply. One of the highest death

rates in the city. Walk # blocks north: boutique café, independent movie

theatre, artesian gift shop, 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


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2024, 2,000+ weapon systems

6.7 million orders / year

$4.4+ 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



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Field Notes

 

 





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



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My field notes archive mistakes of capture:

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






Here echoes my present-historical traces.





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City 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, city in which I buy coffee in white paper cups;


I make myself sick.

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

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. 






Paige Webb is an interdisciplinary poet-scholar. Other categorical boxes to aid legibility: they’re a queer, neurodivergent being of settler descent and a doctor untrained in CPR. They are an assistant teaching professor of English at Rockhurst University and recipient of [accolade], [accolade], [accolade]. You can find some of their work at Anomaly, Blackbird, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Indiana Review, The Kenyon Review, Poets.org, Poetry Northwest, Vinyl, Volt, West Branch, and the chapbook Tussle.