A gauze bandage wraps the land 
and is unwound, stained orange with sulfites. 

as if         you were ever wide-eyed enough to believe in urban legends
as if         these plot elements weren’t the stalest of clichés: the secret lab, the 
        anaerobic chamber, the gloved hand ex machina, the chemical-
        infused fog

For instance, this lushly verdant plain. Imagine it dialed back to featurelessness, each spiraling stalk retracted, each filigree rosette slow-blinking shut.

                  crown of infrared
                  song of drifting dune
The smooth-boled trees of his interior

1.

hyperarticulated giant black ants endlessly boiling out of a heaped-up hole
in the sand

how can I
ask you to
absolve me

couldn’t stop / himself picking 
his red / lest it
pinken lest / it pale 

was it that / that glance / backward

downward / so evidently / an afterthought   

the body / enacting / its relentless

The husband wants to be taken back
into the family after behaving terribly,

The world is your lawyer.
Pawn-shop pearls.
Hair like telegraph wire.