Having for so long watched others
set to work before me,
I enter now the suit of heavy cotton
and slip my hands into goatskin gloves,
those sly parodies of nature.
The galea lowers its darkness over me
dimming the world,
coaxing me to safety.
I check myself:
the quality of my disguise,
the state of things in their right place,
and at last lean down among them.
Their sound comes up,
thousand-fold and loud,
like the cars that passed close by
when I walked along
the highways as a child.
And immediately
sickly, small, and orange,
I overwinter with them there
until the great smoke pours down
like air through bared teeth.
-Andrew Storino