“[] was only interested in uncovering the subfloor that he imagined would be a map to the fire.”

                                                                                                                                              -Beyler Report



In ’92 they defined the standard of care for fire investigation and confirmed that plastics

can look like liquid spills after a fire. Since plastics captured the market after World War II,

everything we own looks like arson fuel. To live surrounded by your presumed guilt, drink

the evidence, breastfeed the evidence into infants, to be laid down in a crib of suspicion.

Your parents watch with a philosopher’s anxiety of the numinous, torn up floorboards,

a telltale heart. When Thich Quang Duc was candled across that intersection in Saigon,

what was found skulking around his luminous mind? Is this the hard, gem-like flame?

Is this the hard, gem-like light? A spring so silent you could hear the plastic in his organs

crackling like a fireside chat, which your parents hear ears pressed against your new belly.

In ’92 they advised all fires are accidental until proven otherwise. And with his five eyes’

foresight, our angry god dangled us over his furnace to determine whether we would catch.

It was an autumn of orange spiders and orange leaves, deciding to embody the philosophy:

one might as well live combustibly in a burning world. What is burnable will catch beside

a being made of blazing. The marshal will scry anthropology after they fill the final crib

of plastic, in the ground of plastic, in an age of plastic. At the body’s trial, they might argue

the fire tells a story, I am just the interpreter. A terrible point of origin, but how to burn.