Bear arms. The pun carries the whole argument: the right to bear arms, and a bear with arms, using them for what arms are for. One is raised around a friend. Nothing in either paw. The sky is the other reading. Missiles rise off the left edge over a small scrawled city and a stand of pines, PATRIOT lettered down the tallest fuselage. Drones hang in the air like flies that learned to wait. Red balloons drift up on white strings, and one white rocket has already found its first target: a balloon, caught mid-pop in an orange burst. That is the whole war in one image. The sky full of childhood, the sky full of ordnance, and both of them ours. Bombing the innocence from the sky, one balloon at a time. The purple bear stands the way a stuffed animal stands on a bed, guarding everything and able to stop nothing. Saucer eyes. A taped-on grid of teeth. The heart worn outside the body, POWER lettered down one hip, a hatched patch on the shoulder where it has already been mended once. The black bear beside it is the same animal after the world got to it: horns, fire burning inside the eyes, one tear, and the fur scratched full of what it was made to carry. A pentagram, a star, crosses, 666, numbers, and a broken heart. One bear kept its fur. One got the record carved in. They stand together anyway, and the balloon between them has not popped yet. By the black bear’s leg the ground turns to a panel of scrawled words, and the one that surfaces first is INNOCENCE. The full moon watches from the corner. It has seen every war and every bedtime, and it is not surprised. The first work painted on linen.