It’s the talons stabbed and spread through
the nervous system that keep the mouse twitching

and give it the performance of life.
A boy reads the forest floor: A bouquet. A pitying.

He reads the horizon: an unkindness.

A man is dragging his body from the child’s clothes.
The material will never give

the same. Even shadows fall in embrace, but here
it is the night that grants the light agency.

The body can get lost under something
so dark. Or a body can only get lost.

But to choke, you need at least two hands,
and by no means necessary, do they need

to be from the same person.

This is God as the gutter-mouth blush spread
into the shape of a moon. This body, another name

for home or sin. A slender throat gives
at the slightest urging.

Like building a house, without ever seeing a house.
Trauma: a nervous trembling, the body’s

architect and its own demolition.

—-

Fisayo Adeyeye is an MFA candidate at San Francisco State University. He has works published in The Collapsar, Little River, Potluck Magazine, and has work forthcoming in Winter Tangerine Review, Inferior Planets, and The Wildness. Talk to him on tinybluewhales@gmail.com about ants, whales, and other animals of comparable size.