Sam Sax Animal Kingdom my brother shaved the word blue into the side of a living goat & called it free advertising we laughed every time we drove past their pen. as the fur grew in the word faded into a neat sepia & then a thin memory. i care most for animals in books my love for my dogs grew unspeakably after each died & still never seemed to match the limbic sobs of the fern boy in the fern book. nostalgia is an animal that refuses the bridle. it goes & comes from our homes as it pleases. at least the microscopic spiders in your eyelashes get their eating in. at least the micro-fauna in your guts, their ecosystem. when the wind blows from the east the slaughterhouse creeps onto campus blue is the color of my true love's hair. blue is the blood light tricked through white skin. blue is the color of my brother & my lips after hours of whippets & weeping & who knows how we're still here have you ever seen the eyes of a goat close up? their pupils are twin machine dug graves, they can see nearly 360 degrees around them, which means when my brother came for them with the razor, they saw him coming, they let him do it.