They kidnapped Maduro on a Tuesday.
Not arrested. Kidnapped.
Hands on flesh, body moved against its will,
the physical fact of being grabbed,
of sovereignty ending where fingers grip arm,
where a man becomes cargo,
where the border of your skin
means nothing when empire decides otherwise.
Snatched like a purse, like prey,
like your body is just matter to be relocated,
like the state can reach across lines on a map
and take you, move you, cage you,
because power is always, finally, about bodies—
who gets to move them, who gets to stop them,
whose flesh is sacred, whose is just
meat to be processed.
Call it what it is: piracy with paperwork,
the same hands that throttled Allende,
that drowned Lumumba in his own blood,
that wrote “regime change” in the margins
of every country that dared
to keep its own oil.
The news says “detained” and I want to vomit.
The news has always been a clean word
for a dirty thing, a pressed shirt
over a broken rib cage,
and we swallow it, we let it
slide down our throats like medicine,
like it’s not poison,
like it’s not us holding the syringe.
Someone in my feed posts about sourdough.
Someone reviews a new restaurant.
Empire commits a felony on international television
and we discuss whether oat milk
tastes better in lattes or flat whites,
our mouths full of milk and empire,
our phones warm in our hands,
scrolling past coups like weather.
Day 67. Day 68. Day 69.
The Filton strikers are past Bobby now,
past the threshold where the body
stops being a body and becomes
a bag of chemicals eating themselves,
where kidneys are pickling in their own brine,
where the liver swells and softens like spoiled meat,
where the heart, listen to this:
the heart strips protein from its own chambers
to feed the brain one more day,
cannibalizes itself, cell by cell,
a suicide in slow motion,
and they are still alive, still conscious,
trapped inside the demolition.
Their stomach linings are ulcerated, weeping.
The intestines are paralyzed, distended.
The tongue splits like old leather.
The eyes retreat into caves.
And they are awake for all of it,
conscious while their bodies commit suicide in slow motion,
watching themselves become the thing
they’ll leave behind.
Thatcher in ‘81: her body worked.
Every morning, bladder emptying on schedule,
bowels moving, kidneys filtering,
liver breaking down last night’s gin
into something her blood could handle.
She showered. Felt hot water on skin that fit.
Dressed herself in clothes that hung right
on a frame that wasn’t collapsing inward.
Ate breakfast while Bobby’s stomach lining
was bleeding into itself, while his body
was deciding which organs to sacrifice next.
Her teeth bit through toast.
His mouth was splitting like old fruit.
She swallowed easily.
He couldn’t keep water down anymore.
And she knew. She knew every day,
knew the count, knew what was happening
in those cells, and still she slept,
still she woke with her body intact,
still she felt nothing fail.
Starmer now: same thing.
Morning routine. Shower running hot.
Soap, shampoo, the easy intimacy
of a body you can trust not to betray you.
He shaves. Steady hands. Skin
that heals from a nick, blood that clots,
cells that regenerate on schedule.
He eats. Stomach acids that digest
instead of corrode. Intestines that move food
through peristalsis, that automatic wave
his body performs without asking.
He pisses clear. His kidneys work.
They filter. They balance. They don’t drown him
in his own waste.
At night, he lies down and his heart
just beats, doesn’t consume itself,
doesn’t choose between brain and muscle,
doesn’t have to decide what dies next.
Two hours away, men are rotting.
He could stop it with a phone call.
But his body feels good.
His body feels nothing.
And that’s enough.
Day 70. Day 71. Day 72. Day 73.
There is no record now.
We are past maps. Past precedent.
This is uncharted: how long can tissue
sustain consciousness on nothing?
How many days until the kidneys
drown the brain in urea?
How long until the heart
eats the last of itself
and stops?
They are finding out.
They are teaching us the answer.
And we are taking notes
with our thumbs.
ICE killed Renee Nicole Good this week.
Poet. Mother of three. Wife.
Winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize.
37 years old. US citizen.
Shot in the head while trying to leave.
Wednesday morning in Minneapolis.
She’d just dropped her six-year-old at school,
driving home with her wife
when they encountered ICE agents on a snowy street.
An agent approached her car, screaming,
grabbed the door handle,
and when she tried to drive away
reversing, then forward, trying to leave
he shot her in the head.
Multiple times.
Through the windshield.
While she was leaving.
Trump called her a domestic terrorist.
Said she “violently, willfully, and viciously”
ran over an officer.
The officer stayed on his feet the entire time.
No visible injuries.
Vance called her death “a tragedy of her own making,”
called her “a victim of left-wing ideology.”
She was a Christian who went on mission trips.
She loved to sing, studied vocal performance.
She made messy art with her kids.
She hosted a podcast with her late husband,
who died in 2023 at 36,
leaving her a widow with three children.
She had recently moved to Minneapolis with her wife,
experiencing the city, she said,
a pride flag in her Instagram bio:
“poet and writer and wife and mom.”
Her mother said she was “one of the kindest people.”
Her ex-husband said she’d never been to a protest.
Her neighbor said she’d fed them tea and cookies
a few weeks before.
Her six-year-old asked to pet their dog.
And now she’s dead.
Shot by an agent who claimed self-defense
while video shows him stepping to the side,
firing into her window as she tried to leave,
her wife in the car screaming
“That’s my wife, I don’t know what to do!”
The FBI has frozen out Minnesota investigators.
There will be no state inquiry.
The federal government investigates itself
and finds itself blameless, always,
finds the body acceptable, the shooting justified,
finds new ways to say
some flesh doesn’t matter,
some blood can be spilled on snow
and called policy, called enforcement,
called anything but murder.
One week.
Seven days.
Maduro kidnapped, strikers dying, woman killed,
and I’m sitting here with coffee,
with central heating, with kidneys that work,
with a body that isn’t devouring itself,
with a government that does this in my name,
with taxes I pay that buy the cages,
the planes, the violence,
and I’m still here, still comfortable,
still breathing while others stop.
Empire naked, strikers past the point
where flesh forgives, a woman
murdered by policy and nobody
in power losing sleep.
And tomorrow I’ll wake up
and my body will rise.
My organs will cooperate.
I’ll make tea, I’ll check my phone,
I’ll move through my day.
Maduro in a cell.
Strikers counting down to nothing.
A woman’s children waking without her.
And us with our working kidneys,
our bodies that cooperate,
our organs that don’t betray us,
still here, still breathing,
still knowing exactly what we know.
The week closes.
Another opens.
The bodies pile.
We do it again.
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