by Bradley Allf
“Well of course you’re trapped.”
What did you expect?
Layers, inversions, the way
snow flips a landscape
to air and muff
and footsteps. What else?
Something found, a series
of doors,
a detail missed.
And you found—
an island
of flightless birds.
The woman’s a bird,
the dog’s a bird, the haze
of summer is the bird-god
of light, and Scott the painter
is a particularly ugly sort
of bird.
The heart of the island?
is hot and smells of guano
because that’s all it is
for a thousand feet
of burrowing
and at the bottom—
a retired street pony
stumbles around a track
looking for freshwater
eyes white, and unyielding.