nothing alive can tell me what i wish to know, not when the moon is hollow and round like sadness and not round like the bright warm fullness that moths flock to. there is nothing to be found in the expanse of the sky; it means more than gnats on a midsummer evening, more than the deer, startled wood edges and cartilage antlers that they are, hooves wearing through dirt and worn in return; it means thought and pavement and the buzzing of a brain that will never be rid of.

and under the burning electric white of a lightbulb and the obtrusive silence of the air conditioner, a subdued cutting.

click.

once, i dreamed of the tack-trip-thump of hooves darting against unbridled weeds, a viciousness in its false reality, the hunch forward of wild haunches and ears twitching to a wealth of sounds—the webbed start of a frog’s croak, the snap shut of a baby bird’s beak after its screech. when i must clip my nails i allow myself to imagine the shorn scratch of cloven keratin wearing against rock and parch-dust terrain, instead of a fear of brown grit and sodden dirt against unworn finger pads—there is a shame in their clean tenderness.

clip.

clop goes a metal horseshoe against leaden pavement, a gravity that rings out. everything alive is buried in beastly black eyes, somewhere unreachable, unknowable. somewhere else, i drag a nail through loose soil, grasping onto that space in between earth and that conscious urge to clean, to pick out the crescent compact muck and return them to slivers of white empty moonlight.