As our very own Charles Mudede has noted, nature has begun to take back our city streets. As with rats in Seattle, so with goats in Wales.

The sudden appearance of goats in that tiny UK town reminded me of the sudden appearance of goats in Natalie Diaz's great poem, "It Was the Animals," which comes from her 2012 hit, When My Brother Was an Aztec, available at local bookstores. If you like the poem and you're in the mood, go ahead and pick up her new book, Postcolonial Love Poem.

A few things:

• "It Was the Animals" is a perfect example of a narrative poem. In the beginning we get the image of a piece of wood that the speaker's brother believes is Noah's ark. Then we get some artfully placed expository information, along with the rising action of him being conflicted about whether to show the speaker the "ark" or not. Then we get the full-on surreal biblical climax of the animals flowing out of the speaker's imagination, along with suddenly more musical and colorful language. Then, as the brother's reality completely consumes the speaker's reality, we get the falling action of the water rising, with a few nice callbacks to objects from earlier in the poem—even the images have their own narratives in this poem. Finally, the brother—who at the beginning of the poem was seen as in his own world—has fully taken the throne in our world, holding the "ark" high in the air like a victorious king. That pyramid structure is the same structure of every major Hollywood movie, and it works just as well in movies as it does in poems.

• I love the way Diaz slowly transforms the brother figure into Noah's ark, the object of whatever hallucination/vision he's having. His hands are "wrecked," like the ship. Later he's "wrecked open." And then, finally, even though he's reached his peak, his body is "a hull of bones."

• Yet again I find solace in the humor here. In the middle of the poem's fantastical swerve, which comes in the middle of an apparently dark episode in the brother figure's life, Diaz makes a goat joke. "...The oryxes with their black matching horns, / javelinas, jaguars, pumas, raptors. The ocelots / with their mathematical faces. So many kinds of goat." There ARE so many kinds of goat. How did they ever fit on one boat?