A Wayward Cow’s Worst Nightmare
The New York Times on the Devil's Rope Museum, in Texas, dedicated to the history of barbed wire
It’s a wayward cow I now find
in the dream where I’m back in Texas
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
days in their copper stacks. I’m back
in Texas, where I lived
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
darken, her scarred
back still mapped. 
Biosentimentality
One Year After My Move to California, I Jell-O Wrestle My Texan Past in a Dream
A Wayward Cow's Worst Nightmare