The sky is not falling it’s

failing

as the rainband doxes trees in a wiretap wind :

seismic 7, the plastisphere

swelling, 413 AR.

Here’s what little I know

about going

about it : coldblack city

streets in an outage, kinky

blowdown a tape on a loop, the scuffed

muscle and worn

bone of a rotator cuff like a door come off

its hinge.

A prettiness

to break my face against. Or the government’s.

The sky is flailing—a hoax, a

helix, its daylight

an algorithm of

textured demos and Perlin noise

on a dome—and every time the sunshine dims

the system is

infrathin.

The afternoon twitching in Afib with

fog at the far end of town, purling

like a tectonic crack

shellacked in iPhone glass, my data

shadow flickers along the paywall and

casts me

out  :  a whisper

through the darknet. A pearl.

Fox field at evenfall.

Andrew Zawacki was a 2016 Howard Foundation fellow in poetry. His most recent poetry book is Videotape (Counterpath). His new translation of Sébastien Smirou, See About (La Presse), earned grants from the NEA and the Centre National du Livre.