The Birds

My dad was not the type to buy an animal on impulse. When I was in elementary school, his companion, which he dutifully let out to pee at increasingly narrow…

I like the modesty of the display cases; their white frames arranged like paragraphs on the wall. Within each, a bird or a group of birds, mounted against a light…

* * * Memory of a Bird And so we rage quietly. The coffee filter clutches ache, the coarse taste of it. Your glacial gait along the halls of half…

* * * “He is the mountain streams’ own darling, the humming-bird of blooming waters, loving rocky ripple-slopes and sheets of foam as a bee loves flowers, as a lark…

Freedom. A Blue Jay flew in circles above the birdbath we had in our backyard the day my mother left. She left one cage only to walk into another. She…

* * * The rainbow lorikeets and cockatoos are screeching away I’m in bed in the converted garage holding onto the corner of this beaded cushion like a child at…

* * * First it was the birds, but it may as well have started in the dirt, with the bugs, or out in the fields, the pests rooting stalk-side.…

I used to draw V-shapes on the blank page and call them birds. I liked how easy it was to start with empty sky and fill it endlessly with hundreds…

* * * It is green and blue and yellow where I can see out the window instead of concentrating on the page. That famous poet chastised me for putting…

* * * Sparrow frantic chirping a thread around his neck I’m afraid to touch him he’ll die hanging from my fence I reach out       take him in the palm…

My turn, my turn, my turn! My kids shriek and race around the house, bickering over who gets to use the something next. It doesn’t really matter what it is.…

* * * Momma makes Bird for dinner every Sunday. Her and the afternoon spend their hours stuffing and plucking and cooking. I spend mine on the kitchen floor, blowing…

* * * Fireworks of feathers trickle like indignant rain & the skyscrapers don’t apologize. Neither does the janitor’s broom as stunned (but still alive, still alive) warblers get swept…

It was already over by the time I found the goose. Which I should have known then, she’d said as much. But she’d said things before that weren’t true. Her…