Birdwolf is a new year-long project authored by the collective Entropy community. It is a collaborative online epic poem written by the Entropy community on a weekly basis. A different author will write the next stanza or section of the poem each week, to be posted every Tuesday, following the previous post from the previous week, and following a very limited set of guidelines (that each author has one week to write the next piece after the previous week’s installment goes up, that the installment should build from the previous section’s content and form, and that contributions should range between 8 and 24 lines or be a visual work).
Follow the entire epic poem here: Birdwolf.
The twenty-sixth installment is presented this week by Barrett Warner.
XXVI.
My old friend grief beating me at no hold ‘em
under the dappled sycamore—
tree that sheds its bark like a snake.
How often,
it begins with a rabbit, nose twitching
to breathe as fast as its pulse—
unable to hibernate, unable to ever
stop being a rabbit playwright.
I loved the fire, and black hudson…
No, you aren’t as powerful as your uncle.
Tease the rabbit, game up its meat with adrenaline,
and stories of all the shapes
you’d make if you were a sculptor.
A bird will eat anything that doesn’t eat it.
The rabbit lives with you on your uncle’s island
you walk around saying, No fucking joke, an island,
and later both of you move to Brooklyn
and fall asleep to the sounds of basketball.
You motion hand over hand, waving arms.
I’d make this shape, and add metal parts.
One flies to prey, one waits for prey to come to it.
The doe tastes too much of cancer
so you add vegetables that ripen underground:
carrot, shallot, beet, potato, dirt.
You wish you had shut her eye
before putting her in the stove.
The fireworks within. The Mahler without.
From this five gallon planet of yellow clay—
you sculpt your mother enjoying a blueberry flapjack
in a puddle of boiled tree sugar.
Breakfast is so much better than sex.
The life coach says:
You care too much. You love too much.
You don’t wash your hands enough.
Shoot your uncle when you have the chance,
and kill the rabbit more quickly instead of poisoning its uterus.
Come with me, grief, the sky is waiting, and we’ve got tickets to Waitress.
