Perched on one foot, latching a sandal.
First I see an olive tree—and then the magnetic tree.
Orbits of objects, carefully balanced.
Flick the pupil and, as if by prayer, a lizard is vanquished.

The hedgehog extracts the root of the sky – a dark prophet
shouldering the full weight of Sebastian’s body.

The hedgehog has trickled out of a sieve – its back is
at odds with itself, so meticulously plural.

Halfway into the journey – just puncture me with a compass.
Zero-kilometer, where fabled rivers converge, reversing polarity: drain.
Suppose it a tunnel, at once the air is set tight as a lattice.
Hurray! You are launched from the maw of a soil-based yawn.

Hangnail, dangled all the way down to the switchflow entrails,
there to consult the register: vapors, extralarge rock, and the coiled bands.
You unfasten your jaw at the plywood façade like a conscript,
oil, the armed, double-barreled ram turns the corner: en garde!

In a factory where they make chloramphenicol
          cats          loiter

one—gnarled
          like a woodblock: waterlogged, barnacled
another—thin with an elongated tongue—
          a fireman’s hook
and the third—huge like a calm
          in the Persian Gulf