What arrives when you’re barefoot, again
is a dream of shared pets, partners,
the garden of dissolving homes, a vegetable box

made from the rails of a queen bed, all the new
children holding hands at the dissection
of a cow’s eye. The lids never close, and in each

middle of the nights, we finger-print
and scroll through this asleep area of world, the like,
these unfollows, closing the window.

There was no privacy when the baby
gorilla was born at the city zoo.
My father watched it on his internet,

a body held by a much bigger body
swaddled in its own fur. The stream
has a quiet audio that echoes repeated whispers

to remember a certain hope made
from tree parts, warm hides
pressed up against glass in shade.

Adam Deutsch is the author of a full-length collection, Every Transmission (Fernwood Press). He has work recently in Poetry International, Thrush, Juked, AMP Magazine, Broken Lens Journal, and Typo, and has a chapbook called Carry On (Elegies). He teaches in the English Department at Grossmont College and is the publisher of Cooper Dillon Books. He lives with his spouse and child in San Diego, CA.