The Birds

The halo told me I was on the edge, and this wasn’t a simple hangover from Benny’s Halloween party. The alarm clock, the ceiling light, even my bedroom door, all…

* * * Those first days in Moscow, they were the enemy: their gray down gathering in corners like the frail remains of long dead cicadas. their droppings scarring the…

Chicken Vigil Who will believe me when I say my hens forgo their daily dig for bugs and choose instead to sit like saffron Buddhas beside their sister-hen whose legs…

I pick up the flat fledgling looking for the fall in purple fluid swell filling transparent cranium, dark blue blooming under the pink sheer of skin, so thin. There’s no…

* * * * * *   J.I. Kleinberg is an artist, poet, and freelance writer, she is a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. Her found poems have appeared in Diagram, Heavy Feather…

* * * Come sit and empty your pockets, child, and let us count what we’ve got. We can sort it this way: for me, love counts. And cancer counts.…

Stones I wanted to never feel hurt again so I attached a leash to a dog I borrowed for a controlled walk through a hot February in LA. We counted…

after Julissa Emile, Anita Dias, Golden, Brandon Melendez, & Valin Paige   when under emotional distress, as with a cage that does not provide breath for its wings, a domesticated…

⌘ Bluebirds Renting the Squash Studio  A storm approaches dark energy bursting rumbling toward, I sit outside in my bathrobe and wait for the bluebirds to return to their new house,…

* * * There was a poem waiting in the dead bird on my car. I did not want to know it, did not want to know that death, couldn’t…

The Northern Cardinal is our state bird here in Kentucky, as well as seven other states. It was also a frequent subject of my late grandfather’s paintings. Common folklore, is…

  Silver slivers float with the crows. Black beak opens and delivers shivers as it glistens in my fingers. Bird show me how to build my nest. Frail feathers caked…

a leafless branch curves when a second bird lands following the first of the calendar year I make no resolution to transform you can’t know how you are in fact…

Need Not I need not fly I fold my wings I bow my head I wait for things I need not feel you Everywhere I need not breathe In so…