Investigations Into The Tectonics Of The Tibetan Plateau

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The chief inspector leans back in his chair
and picks his teeth with a matchstick.

The dead aren’t missing much, he muses.

My right arm hangs dead at my side.
Perhaps I’m bleeding from somewhere as well.

His men, spread out across the plateau,
rap smartly on the doors of empty apartments.

I only escape because they let me.
But the moon is chipped, and even the star-

strung ladder on which I might
once have climbed wobbly toward it

is gone.