S o p h i a T e r a z a w a —

Cloud Roulette

Takes a form on wheels you follow midtown.

Slippers alight sixty frames per second.

As planned, block by block, I cut the slim field.

There, one of us is cruel. Rephrase it—we

          step off any bus

          off any corner

          facing west. Do tell

          how the film’s faithful

          to you. In batches—

Color corrected. Can we speak at last?

Blunting each other? Không. My inner seam

          pales in direct sun.

Tell quickly of omens before monsoon.

I sleep on that bus from north to south. Không.

Up north to immeasurable torrents.

February, our friend dies. You outline

          a storyboard full

          of his debts, skin, curls.

Tarnish blends on a wet plate you hold then.

Missing a mark assigns secondary

          skips. In Ithaca

          thrown downhill cracks fruit.

But Lucas who throws his body after.

At eighty, my knees hurt like yours once broke

          off a bucking horse.

Sweetest in tall grass with watermelon.

Không, tell no future lovers after me

          I laughed at this scene

          I left when I could.

          I was cruel. Don’t search

          the field for what beat

          turning our horses

          loose. Don’t save their shoes,

          resoled and painted

          lichen brown. The sun

          sweeps its seventh house.

When you call, our friend is at the station.

Looking like rain, waving his arms around.

Pumping

for Fatima

I held the summer in two palms

chapped, a Douglas-fir night

like its bat throwing a bookish

wind into the door. You burned

what wasn’t useful—eggshells

painted blue so dark they split

evenly one way or the other—

within its heart, your ritual

craved a necessary quiet. I

shrank into this early sitting

too close. The bat wheezed

across our porch. I couldn’t help.

Yellow jackets swarmed; you said

fear ran deeper, and a mouse—

finding the bat—gestured

go, that way. I don’t remember

how we lived past a season. It

doesn’t matter. You learned to run.

Untraceable, wordless without

metaphor, basil in your hair.

Steller’s Jay

Half of sharing one acre from your oak to the great

sanded ridge of Eugene herds a dream from stormwater,

that is, how far into the night young swallows would travel

to shelter. In this parable, danger has no shape but larger

birds circle it. Sunday. Your murder is carried over from rumors,

the messenger whose face cannot be true or human though he

speaks in rhythm with his lips. His eyes are tin-blue. Earth

he regards through and through, adopting its posture

incommunicable in any language, the boy whose skin as

a cloth from near galaxies made real. I try to wake,

carry you downstairs, but that boy—not a prophet—is

hatching already colonies of insects through cocoons

before their expression. Fifty pairs of wings. The vision ends.

Your gardens surface a papery sound of moths. Morning.

A second oak has fallen by your home and a bristled,

chucking cry. The spike with blood by your gate

calling an old, bountiful terror—moon-dusted, born

at once, drying their bodies, together.

.