In Once You’re Put in a Box, You’ve Been Defeet’d, Alkēbulan orchestrates a hauntingly poetic disruption of innocence and form. A spectral Black child—eyes like collapsed stars—emerges from a discarded cardboard box, her presence part apparition, part protest. The feet, dismembered yet gently resting outside the box like an afterthought, complete a surreal visual pun that swells with layered grief. The scene is unmistakably mundane: a sunny, bleached-out curb, fast food trash, palm trees, an aging car. But the subject matter is anything but. This is resurrection through confinement. Surveillance through neglect. Here, the box is more than a prop—it is the coffin, the cage, the classroom, the ghetto, the statistic. And the title lands like a final blow: to be boxed is to be defeated. Or defooted. Alkēbulan speaks fluently in paradox, and this piece murmurs quietly beneath the noise of a cracked society: Who gets boxed in? Who gets to walk away?