.It’s
in the air, in the crow
pecking that telephone wire.
He must be awfully hungry
or transfixed by the currents,
cross-continental waves,
the holiday calls between
Aunt Emma and her sister
stuck in that nursing home
in Jersey where they sip
Thanksgiving—thinned soup
of turkey, mash and pie
through an oversized straw.
Crows being harbingers
of doom, this bird must sense
the extra voltage, everyone
thinking about dead friends
and loved ones this year
who won’t grace the table
and the ones who do
make murder seem
a reasonable idea. It’s
in the blond woman
wearing a black raincoat
on the corner, stone-faced,
watching a truck haul off
the black Mercedes she just
wrapped around a Eucalyptus,
breaking its life in two, just like that.
|
Michelle Bitting has work forthcoming or
published in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Narrative, Crab Orchard
Review, Passages North, Many Mountains Moving, Rattle, Linebreak,
and others. Poems have appeared on Poetry Daily and Verse
Daily. In 2007, Thomas Lux chose her full-length manuscript,
Good Friday Kiss, as the winner of the DeNovo First Book Award
and C & R Press published it in 2008. She lives in Los
Angeles with her husband, the actor, Phil Abrams, and their
two children
|
| |
