This poem is taken from PN Review 256, Volume 47 Number 2, November - December 2020.
The Fools and other poems
The Fools
The way they walked to church over the fields and made everything milk white.
The way the heat-haze took them out by the ankles and that cloud of white
hair that could actually have been cloud. The way they swam in and out
of sight like a pair of stupid moons behind clouds, a kind of cut-out
flatness that made you want to push them all the way over
and drive a steamroller over them real slow.
Machine
I married a machine that could reconfigure itself. The machine
survived everything. The function of the machine was to burn fuel.
The machine made everything machine-brand – machine-brand
coffee, machine-brand daisies, machine-brand duvet-cover.
My eyes were very heavy when I looked at the machine. To me
the machine looked like a machine, but to other people it looked
like other things.
Parts of the machine were vintage to show originality. The vintage
...
The way they walked to church over the fields and made everything milk white.
The way the heat-haze took them out by the ankles and that cloud of white
hair that could actually have been cloud. The way they swam in and out
of sight like a pair of stupid moons behind clouds, a kind of cut-out
flatness that made you want to push them all the way over
and drive a steamroller over them real slow.
Machine
I married a machine that could reconfigure itself. The machine
survived everything. The function of the machine was to burn fuel.
The machine made everything machine-brand – machine-brand
coffee, machine-brand daisies, machine-brand duvet-cover.
My eyes were very heavy when I looked at the machine. To me
the machine looked like a machine, but to other people it looked
like other things.
Parts of the machine were vintage to show originality. The vintage
...
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