A thin black hand, a white ham hand. Confucius with a typewriter. The poem loses history, like the small stuffed animal we left on a Madrid subway station bench. I went back on the train, but it’s been lost again since. Ads for Valentine’s Day feature enormous stuffed bears, strawberries drizzled in chocolate. Consumption insures object-loss. She cut me into ribbons with her questions, then asked if I was angry. I would have liked to have heard Mandela, says Father Bob. You have committed crimes against humanity, and we forgive you. Mostly, we forget. He had not consumed his rage like gristle, spitting it back. On the bus, someone spat at me, Petra says. After her soccer team lost, the tall girl spat at my daughter’s shoe. We spit at, but the and is arbitrary, knows its boundary, releases it.