The silence and peace of this place
creeps through on birdsong.

The instruction invites overthinking:
describe your hometown through
the medium of simple sentences

I ask my father to dinner, pretending he is still alive,
ask him what he’d like. He says a pork chop which is not
something I know how to cook.

I don’t know why you bother with poetry Vlad mutters as he adjusts the current in the magnets, forcing them to rhyme with each other.

Today’s operative on the ohrwurm shift
has hacked the WiFi password
in the ear canal and now I’m looping back
endlessly to a misheard lyric . . .

Laid down, his upraised face is
White – offputting – on a plumped pillow.

“The all-consuming passion
is rarely found
more than a recipe
for misery,”
you read

He appears like a paper bag blown onto the feeder,
punching his beak time and again into the peanuts.

If you follow faerie lights
that wisp where boardwalk
becomes trackway, make sure
you’re stocked with milk,
or bread and salt.