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EUROPA AND THE BULL   The boat was loaded on a truck The truck took me to the border I was alone, hiding in the hull’s chine and emerged with a two-sided oar in my hands At the checkpoint, hordes of refugees in riot control formation without the gear They were asking the questions ‘Who wrote this book?’ or ‘Where did this phrase first appear?’ To pass through I had to match quotes and author names to book titles Sometimes the refugees got specific about characters or incidents And if I answered one query correctly they released others like clay pigeons and my rifle quickly faltered They seemed vituperative but eventually let me through once a look of shame had overwhelmed my fraudulent visage They were well read Their city was deserted You were taking a bucket shower in a roofless thatch stall under the full gaze of stars and your matted hair was a raft We said nothing as our lips simulated union before you panicked ‘A monster’s coming,’ you said, ‘Speak, I implore you, now that you’re no longer a continent apart’         PALESTINE, TEXAS   ‘I’ve never been,’ I said to my friend who’d just come back from there ‘Oh you should definitely go,’ she said ‘The original Palestine is in Illinois’ She went on: ‘A pastor was driven out by Palestine’s people and it hurt him so badly he had to rename somewhere else after it Or maybe it goes back to a 17th century Frenchman who traveled with his vision of milk and honey, or the nut who believed in dual seeding’ ‘What’s that?’ I asked ‘That’s when an egg is fertilised by two sperm,’ she said ‘Is that even viable?’ I asked ‘It is,’ she said, ‘on rare occasions, though there’s no guarantee the longevity of the resulting twins’ She spoke like a scientist but really was a professor of the humanities at heart ‘Viability,’ she added ‘depends on the critical degree of disproportionate defect distribution for a miracle to occur If there is to be life, only one twin lives’ That night we went to the movies looking