from The Unfollowing: 26

Puddings don’t have lungs, melons don’t have riders

Listen—a female seal, a seaport, and a social world

Come day’s end the top of the tree hesitates, pauses, then sweeps on like a

blackboard eraser to clear the horizon

Sit, Shep, incognito

The lid of the sun is heavy, its lashes blink on the horizon, brushing the curve of

the sea

So now they want to grant federal coal subsidies

I heard “suspected pipe bomb” as “suspected python”

The first nest empty and deep, at child’s eye level, in a young fir tree, of twigs

Pathos is at the front line of defense against worries as they approach

I remember almost nothing, only that I am in a room with others and we are

reading through sacks of mail, trying to ferret out spies

She will never believe she’s too old to join a band or make quick vertical moves

on the playing field to really quiet music—she is that still

Then the sparrow went to sleep in a lumber castle

And so we come to chapter LIX, in which I learn that I have failed

Can you believe this shit

Source: The Unfollowing (Omnidawn Publishing, 2016)