It was Lafayette for me.
He was the first,
watching over the farmers market in the summer Square.
I glanced up from choosing just-ripe tomatoes and found him looking at me
with a malevolent gaze.

I was not the first to notice,
and it was not just the Marquis.
It was all the statues, all those human, inhuman faces,
looking at us,
displeased with what they saw.

Maybe, we said,
maybe the dead got wise,
maybe it was them climbing in these bodies
close enough to the ones they remember.
Reaching distance.

Maybe these were our homunculi
at last awakened through no fault of ours,
resentful of their makers,
wanting more.

We veiled the statues, finally,
in heavy canvas, chained them to their plinths,
and in a city where nothing stays,
still, no one took them off, no one even took spray cans to them.
These shrouds will let us disappear them,
we said, we’ll forget them, we’ll forget the way they looked at us.

But then it spread:
we buried the Barbies in a landfill on Staten Island,
baby dolls we sank by the ton in decommissioned subway cars
in the bay close to where Liberty rests,
her monumental face too large to veil.
The action figures, the figurines, the Hummels and the Precious Moments,
we destroyed them, melted and smashed, bagged and hid.
There were tears, the children and collectors, but were they crying for the loss?
Or from the looks of reproach in those painted eyes.

And then the paintings:
We closed the Met;
the storage space at MoMa stuffed to capacity and locked.
Nothing representational remained, not even Picasso’s Demoiselles,
the shifting planes of their faces
threatening more than tradition.

The wheatpasted posters were defaced,
torn down, covered over.
And the movies?
Forget it.
Who could stand to see those actors, larger than life,
staring back,
hungry.

Last night
I passed the mirror in the living room,
the one above the plant stand where the pothos sits,
and I saw myself looking back
with a malevolent gaze.
From the street I heard it:
The screaming.
The sound of shattering glass.