As an art form, trench art is more expansive than soldiers’ craft; it includes objects made by civilians attempting to mediate their feelings about war as bombings escalate and casualties mount. Yet another category within the form wedges somewhere between soldier and civilian: the prisoner/hostage/detainee who generates crafts while in captivity. These makers and their objects increase in number as we read these words—past, present, and future trench art heaps. Somewhere, someone cobbles a piece of old trench art to new trench art. In our rubble to come, epoxy resin will bind dust to dust.

Back in the late ’80s, after the wrap-up of both Bambis, Natalya Bondarchuk relays that the animal doubles of the human actors were donated to the child survivors of the Chernobyl meltdown. In my head, I draw a misshapen map of the USSR; motion lines trace the relocation sites of irradiated children and the forever homes of the animal stars. But what of tonight’s nuclear battlefield? Is there a functional live webcam out there in the Zone of Alienation where I can tune into a shaking spider secreting a skewed lattice of sunlit gossamer strands—its bright irregular warp indicating persistent mutations in her body? Might I spy, with jaundiced, remote eye, the spider eating her own web? After a trauma-feed, she’s full (again) on her own distortions.