outside a ruined casino

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.