When the Budget Cuts came, the Bureau died an old dog’s slow death: kidney stones, cancer, skeleton sucked back to skin, fatless. The only words they could afford were ugly: daiquiri, colonel, pterodactyl—words that looked worse spelled than they sounded loose-lipped, aching in the teeth. In storage, the words that named sensations spoiled. Nameless, each color faded to a pale gray—the gray of an old dog’s ear hair on its last earthly day, lion’s mane and caviar calcified into charcoal croquettes, the plush of a first love’s lips hardened into cool mannequin plastic. Poets packed the storeroom for its Liquidation Sale, dipped their pens in each dead word, wrote around it on the page. Lemon yellow: they savored the summertime citrus scent. A dog barking at the night: they heard his hunger mixed with something—already sold, the word for his disquiet.