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 thirty-fourth installment is presented this week by Adam Atkinson.
XXXIV.
Bidwolf was here
[like a brutal death, the error was loudest, like how “obits unravel the sounds we never heard but remembered,” the missing “r” melancholic, shaping itself, invading every prior plot point, every lyric in her song, etched concentric around the glory hole:]
“Birdwolf has many borders” “we first place our hands * to replace his boners” “or to not forget these boners and their howls:” “I am the droves’ war cry!” and “a stranger is only a person, a cross, the trouble!” and “your anus flares, peers cock or bravuras of bird!” and “I know I mourn its ragged globe!”
“she lands waiters, lingers” “resting in elegant boners” she, “the suspicious sucker siring untouchable urgings” “centering, she waits for the night piece” “heart-seeking missiles of fur and furthering” “unexpected, hard-up, short of risky”
“whirling away, waiting on divorced, dared time” “ineffable impressions of times parsed” beaks sired fangs, and “fangs sired a coffin” “tattoo of funeral succession, leather strop, peril thruster” “worse than a curse” “an ache for penury” “I greet it I greet it I greet it” “goner to seed” “morse animal, disjunctive, feraled semi”
“the rebus takes forever to cum” “the guillotine squeals and spits back the boners” “don’t I have something you weren’t?” “furthered edge, furthered jointing, feraled iris” “glowering eyes, flowering black” “the many to make a garish I” “no you aren’t as powerful as your urn”
“every week they crawled for tales” (for a good time, crawl true true true—
true true true true)
Adam Atkinson is a poet and an Instructor of Creative Writing at Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, where he also lives. He is a doctoral student in fag poetics at the University of Utah, as well as one-sixth of the poetry collective Line Assembly. You can read more of his work at Black Warrior Review, Dreginald, and elsewhere.
