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By Samia Menon

I can only describe things that are real: sharp air that tastes like the color of hospital lights, yellow summers that never come, et cetera. And the King of Kish will tell you, on mountains and on mirrors that only what’s permanent is remembered, only the permanent will exist, wedged between beads of sand and bone, indistinguishable now, as man or men and trace a silhouette of me in mortar on the underpass by your house so they see it crumble and remember— King of Kish King of Kings.