Dying is every yearbook signature squeaking: see you at the beach!, is a rubber Tomahawk with a feather the color of the air around a man your mother kisses, who is not your father at work in his office, picking up a paperweight, then putting that paperweight down solemnly. Dying is your boss chewing on a pen & counting with his fingers, then smiling with one side of his mouth, then counting with his fingers, & chewing on a pen. Dying is a woman so alone in a city that she does not think we see her adjusting her undergarment as she walks, head bent so that her hair falls across her face like the relief of driving snow just when you needed a reason to turn in for the night. Dying is a fold of children in 1928, whose Inuit mother with the help of her eldest daughter, hangs them to end their misery of starvation. Dying is the eldest daughter, who then slips the noose around her own neck as you might put a motel key on a string to hang between your breasts in order to know where it is. Dying is how the ethnographer recorded the story, photographed it coolly — holding his own hand and turning on his heel from a crowd. Dying is the edge-curl of the photograph, which does not make the sound of those hardening bodies, broken teeth in a music box with a loose crank & a clown sadly peeling from the tin overlay. Dying is how we cannot stop looking at it.