more sudden rain
from the rooftop

a news ticker
wraps around

high across the alley
disembodied letters

top headlines, this city
turning into glass–

impermeable, deflective
burying the lede,

ample precedent here–
furniture in the basement

of the Panama Hotel
under decades of dust

left hastily
and never retrieved

a drawer left open
a child’s homework–

internment camps
extant, planned reopenings

and someone arguing
in bad faith–

semantics
willful callowness

a cage is
a cage is a cage