July 2024
Bio Note: I am an author in Boulder, Colorado. I have a PhD in Comparative Literature and my collection Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger, won the Colorado Authors’ League Award for best poetry collection. Currently I’m writing a novel and my next book of poetry will be released in December. Aside from writing and teaching, I enjoy hiking, swimming, and cuddling with my dogs.
the birds
the birds feel
like a long highway
how dark it looks
how it hums
feathered longing calling me
beneath its cadenced skin
a child sounding out
songs with no lyrics
the birds chortling
chucking their seed-shells
elders touching red stones
bountiful ruins
with their sweet wisdom
as warm as honey
and you with your taste
of that long road trip
the highway like a tongue
like mine touching yours
the melody of birds
setting fire to the sun
our motor a blue note
that sometimes
swallows keys
I saw in your blue eyes
and takes the road
that takes you away
Winged
I miss the birds, I tell him, as a shaft of morning light
releases from a crystal, rainbows crashing against the wall.
In February, even the blackbirds don’t sing on the cattails,
the woodpecker doesn’t hammer our roof, mourning doves
and robins don’t swoop or hop in our backyard’s dry dirt.
The parakeets we once kept in a golden cage have died,
their ashes mingling on the slope of Bear Mountain.
I can’t feel flight, I continue. He is a silent landing.
He is forgetting the boy of the sky, the one who dived off cliffs.
He is a long road clinging to a canyon with walls
only the mountain sheep know as well as I my own feet,
with their clinging tendons, how tired they are.
I reach to touch my shoulders, ache for wings. Outside it snows.
One bird was green with a blue tailfeather. He would hop
on my fingers, ride my shoulders as I cooked. Now I gaze
out the window where a hawk rides the wind.
Some seasons only the predators survive, and the prisms are
the promise of capturing light like a song its meandering notes.
I’m hungry, listening, but wary of hunts. The hawk dives.
The slaughter is not on February’s calendar, just the aching empty belly.
I would fly to rainforests, I say. Hot jungle. Winged dirges of song,
canopy calling me. But now all I remember is the girl I was,
all the springs that found me risen.
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