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Buy like a brother. Tiny nations of ants lining up to march away. Nightfall treats our skin like licked envelopes closing. Now clock faces on walls wait it out. Found like a place where bridges once burned, the landscape leaping into dry clouds, formed like our own fickle tirades. Mountains and valleys veering into temples and twisted wrists, divided like two sides of a coin. Places shown, traded, collected. As if sleep were enough to make it new again. Crossing your own chest, your own heart and helpless heights you fear. Lit up like lanterns when the power flickers out. Wide flight into fence and forest, eyes like a bear. Too much foraging turns up hungers hidden, scavengers stealing bits of breath, breaking bones like bread. Softer than stomach, harder than harmonizing without hearing. Caught up like a throat can hold your hymns hostage, circled like a moat. Letters in snow, inked out by charcoal and ash, all the ways we write it out longhand. No abbreviations for these incantations, news spreading through chipped beaks, black feathers fluttered, found. Like a place where beggars once slept, priests once prayed. Sailors sang sadly.
