A Wayward Cow's Worst Nightmare

one year after my move to California. It’s a wayward

cow—brown with one eye slightly

larger and darker than the other. Wilder, like sides

of a bed in which one

of the two sleepers stays awake

hours longer than the other, who turns

in her insomnia to the thin light

that thieves through the door, or

to the cicadas which empty

their loose change into the old

for three-and-a-half years. Where a cow

now leads me through the front door

of the museum. Lengths of barbed wire

stud the walls, budding

their silver oleanders. Don’t look, the cow

says with her wilder eye,

don’t look at the walls where the wire’s

snagged our hide, where our

torn skin, without wind,

sways like paper—it’s a wayward

cow I now follow out the door.

I try not to look

as we leave, but I do, once,

and see a woman. She sleepwalks

through the museum in her swamp-

colored dress, her red hair

tangled like the year, like three-

and-a-half—her arms