Split

Two garden seats, side by side: one is full of leaves & the other, twigs. It looks like an amicable division. A spam comment touts Extraordinarily naked people. I hear a train whistle & remember the beast that stalked me in all my childhood dreams.

Up in the attic, a freshly shed snake skin is stretched across the pink fiberglass. Such separations must be wrenching, however necessary. A bluebottle fly clings to the top of an empty water jug, immobile from the cold. It’s a bad time of year not to be warm-blooded.

I eventually figured out that I was simply in the train’s way, & if I laid down & flattened myself against the ties it would thunder harmlessly overhead. Perhaps those nudists too have mastered the art of getting out of the way, & their bodies are not merely unclothed but transparent, so that you can see the food dissolving in their stomachs & ideas growing in the reptilian coils of their brains. There are protocols for everything, even in the garden. The wind is a very particular host.