i circled a low house with a green roof
through a kind of east coast verdancy,
planting out front with a witch i'd seen
on a billboard yesterday beans, squash,
and something else, not corn,
a low plant like the odd beans so adapted
to this place they expressed different genes
in each square foot with leaf-patterns
to match, i circled the house
but hid as friends entered, saw
them meeting but couldn't hear,
they left and a sense of outside
threat arose; we were attacked with
a belief that we were already dead
but it was repelled, thanks to a
neighbor acting as chief wizard
who had a classification scheme
for such bounded nullities.
i circled the house and saw my
billboard comrade alone, approached
by a towering headless man in sky-
blue cotton longsleeved shirt and
orange safety vest offering
a bracelet of safety-vest mesh, two lines
of yellow retroreflector to match.
unconsciously she put it loose on her wrist,
moving to close the velcro while friends
shouted that this too was an attack
a belief of fear, of false and soporific danger,
though they kept their distance,
and I slid it off her wrist
with a sense of victory
to look down and find it
on my own, and tightening