Still

It was April and it was always about to be something else.

It was the way the belly of birds flashed and flickered against the sunset at seven in the afternoon in April. Like stop motion right before your eyes as they faded high up there until the flat planes of their bodies shifted and you lost them against the outlines of the bubbling blue clouds in the distance that always threatened to break, but rarely did.

How a body can become surface, how fast something alive turns into shape, into outline, into something registered and lost, a kind of flattening. The sky does this. So does the act of looking too long.