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

Then one day she noticed the forest had started to bleed into her waking life.

There were curved metal plates on the trees to see around corners.

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

your lionskin
overcoat