The birds were wood and earth and neither. When the sky offered flight, you could hear them, not as often in winter and not by their voices but by their wings when frightened. Then, you could feel it, deep in the center of cold unusual this early. The ground lived with their movement before and after. You thought you understood and didn’t. The forests echoed wood cut and burned into hurry of roads and subdivisions and their bodies ate their fill against the occasion of their shadow according to the sunlight that kept them here.
Angie Macri is the author of Sunset Cue (Bordighera), winner of the Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize, and Underwater Panther (Southeast Missouri State University), winner of the Cowles Poetry Book Prize. An Arkansas Arts Council fellow, she lives in Hot Springs and teaches at Hendrix College.
