from THIS FIGURE IS PURELY DIAGRAMMATIC

This is it

  light it

It is in the thicket of this
     Axial sickness—


          —bodies stripped

—in shifts

          —stichic

As reeds
     Read
the margins

The landings
                       unmade
     & recoded

  in double light

& the hands
their hands
     Meet
what ends

In one the carrot
     The garrote in one—

Are spent—

That it figures itself
     Out

Through a density
                                of entrants
     Freshly indexed

To the junket of movable parts—

(1) running of the canids
          So canonically
                                    mid-ruin

(2) handlers wearing their miters
          Down to the joints

(3) arm-like processes of tracking
          & torque

(4) lenses in the confidence
          Of motion censors

(5) live valvular tunings
          To unaccompaniment

An operative pallor
     Primps the usual assumptions

What thoughts settle
                                  with what
     Dollish consistency
                                      their somata
                                                          for

The body
                 the yolk
     The body
                     the yoke

What is the matter
     What is it

  a light

  partition

Still the ill slew
                           of the market
     It circles

It enumerates the sequelae
in the after-
     Math of emptied syringes

That the route
                         is refuted
with puncta
     —

All lives do
     Not all lives
                          (a)-(c) count

—(dis)appearances are ambient

  ektara

  over dim vocalizations

The court is metered
                                   in pages
     The defendants
                              are thumbed

They speak of the acts
     Not already spoken for

Its own speech acts
     Acquit it

It follows their hands
     Being tied
                        behind the nation’s back

Behind the hands
     Hands
                 in hindsight

Infinite regress of the corpo-
     Real
in real
time

That they sit on the coals of the earth
at the very mouth of hell
That when they die and go to hell
they come back for a blanket
(6)

They look the part
                               they look
     Like something else

  It looks like no one—

There is a hold
on them
     Theirs
                is a holding pattern
of speech—

—
     —

And the real joke of it is—
(7)

Hold on

It is folding time

The optics
     Are eidetic

(8)
Affecting or relating
to a circle or number of persons
In circular letter
a letter directed to several persons who have the same interest in some common affair

A practice
                  of carapace
     As the active tense
of the captive

If integument
                        is argument
     Against another body

Or extension—

What sur-
                 vives the difference
     In life

What gets
                  to come
     Over
               it

  alight

As it (e)merges
     Into perspective

It rounds the o
of an ongoing
     Hanging

Uncounted faces
demonetized
     & dropped
from the public branch

The headless dream
     Of millinery

          —pinned—

Adornment
     & the (fl)oral passage
                                        of rights

It takes a trunk call—
                                    a reminder—
     The word was the first
accessory—

To record the bodies
     On the line

They say watch
the villains kite
in the current
     Verbal commons

They say catch
the rolling heads
of statistics
     & operations in conversation

Follow the circulation

  a string

  a ringing

  light

In time
             it will have seen
     This before

Enter repeatedly
     Recognized
as inter

The characteristic residue
     On each chain

How long
     Does it
go on

It depends
on a number of actors
     Or will—


The facts unanchor—

(9)
Of or pertaining to the circle
or its mathematical properties
In circular points
the two imaginary points at infinity through which all circles pass

When they recall—

They say all
                      the best
     Thinking
is collapsarian

Kanika Agrawal is an Indian citizen and hybrid specimen raised in six
countries on four continents. She studied biology at MIT and creative
writing at Columbia University and the University of Denver. Her work
appears or is forthcoming in Best American Experimental Writing 2020,
Black Warrior Review, filling Station, Foglifter, Notre Dame Review, SAND,
and various SF&F publications. Her chapbook Okazaki Fragments will
be published in 2020 by Oversound.

Notes:

The phrase “This figure is purely diagrammatic” comes from the following paper,
in which Watson and Crick first proposed a double helix structure for DNA:
Watson, J. D., and F. H. C. Crick. “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure
of Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid.” Nature, vol. 171, no. 4356, 1953, pp. 737-8.

Some lines in italics are quoted or adapted from:
“circular, adj. and n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2019,
www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/33219. Accessed 24 June 2019.

Rulfo, Juan. Pedro Páramo. 1955. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, Grove, 1994.