Leslie ate the apple cores while
Christopher talked back about the day

the sorghum tree cut the wind in half and
God vanished in a three square

mile radius, a compass, where then only there were
the dead birds in a matrix interwoven

with wings, a scarecrow, thing to scare other things, he
said, from the sky the shape of the murmuration

hooked a cue from the sky

the murmuration looked bottomless like

a stomach digging through the garbage for
any rupture of more

of bowl of wind, encircled, he thought, elsewhere
could go forever, weather, selfish weather