No strange bird sings alone

Learning to bring different birds close, use water wisely, and lose my mind a little each day to keep from losing it a lot at once. Plus here's some recently published poems.

Lately there are hummingbirds.

Finches too, and many of them, despite our early spring heartbreak. I have hung bird feeders with all the right bird feed in strategic locations. I asked for help along the way. Never underestimate a bird store employee’s willingness to talk about bird things.

I clean the bird bath, boil water with sugar. I have handled, with my bare hands, a cylinder of grub worms, which maybe for you is no big deal. Maybe you grew up handling grubworms. I did not. This is my truth. I am trying to be free.

And I keep coming back to birds.

I scan the sky, ground, and tree tops in an S-shaped pattern, just like the nerds tell you. I look out the window, sometimes during meetings.

Sometimes—let’s call it last Tuesday because that’s when it was—I look out the window during a meeting and see a crow with a tiny, dead mouse in its beak. I do not keep my cool.

I keep the back door open so I can hear the hummingbirds battle. I do not know how to tell them there’s no need to be so territorial, there is more than enough. I will make the necessary nectar. But we do not speak the same language.

An animal does what it’s born to do. Hummingbirds were born to be assholes and I did not come here to play god. I just like helping living things live, ideally nearby. Nothing comes without risk.

By keeping birds close, you risk, for instance, bird shit on the garden wall. Also the possibility of seeing a tiny, dead mouse in a crow’s beak, which isn’t that bad, really, you’re not a child, but maybe you watch the crow drop the tiny, dead thing in what you guess is its nest and realize, at any given time, there could be a small carcass somewhere in the treetops above you. You spend a lot of time under trees, as much as you can anyway. And while you’ve gotten used to the fact, at your big, big age, that everywhere underfoot is an ancient, fertile amalgam of piss, shit, bones, bugs, and fungus, now you’ve got to make room for the knowledge that there’s a lot of it overhead too.

The whole world is piss, shit, bones, bugs, and fungus, there’s no getting around it. It’s hibiscus too, and hollyhock. Stonefruit ripening, falling easy. Storm cells gathering over the foothills, rivers rising and falling. Sunflowers, brilliant now, will in three months time be different. Just like everything else.

It’s been hard this summer to stand still enough to notice everything.
God help me I’m trying.

When I say god I trust you know what I mean.
In case you do not, I mean everything.

In June, there was a week-long road trip with my mother and two of my tias. We drove to California to eat my mom’s favorite snacks, which I cannot recommend enough, as far as missions go. Go with your mom toward her favorite snacks if you want to live. Take your tia on the roller coaster at Santa Monica Pier eight times. She’s never been on one, for a reason. You could be the reason she has.

Learn what your mother was like at thirteen. Learn she learned young how to hustle authorities. Learn she learned young how to fish from her father, like you learned young how to fish from her father. Learn to ask even your mother for what you need, even and especially if what you need is thirty minutes alone to be quiet. Or to go ride the roller coaster.

I saw my big brothers, whose blood is my blood, to the bone, they are my brothers. We have different dads but who cares. I saw my big brothers and myself in them, and them in me, and isn’t that something? To be older. To have had the chance to grow that way. Not everybody does. We have cousins who didn’t. Friends, too. You have these cousins and friends, also, don’t you. It’s hard not to scream all the time, sometimes, isn’t it. Who gets to get old?

My brothers and I, we’re all alive and reasonably healthy, though I have thick beef with how we treat veterans’ healthcare, for all the money we throw at the military in the woefully misguided and profoundly destructive belief that more planet-destroying weapons and kids turned into murder machines will make anyone on earth safer. If you are reading this, the president, cancel medical and student debt, and expand the court this instant, you coward.

When I cannot scream, I try breathing.
Not a fool-proof method, but worth looking into.

It has been a loving, breathing summer, screaming sometimes too. Forty hours in Chicago for a meeting and a reading, a house full of family for the fourth, a day floating down the Rio Grande, five poems published in three journals with another seven on the way. One day I’ll manage a book or four. Today is not that day.

Today I am sitting outside as much as possible, walking too, replacing nectar, counting finches at the feeder, watching crows.

I am praying for Palestine, for everything rotten to become something else, to see what happens after now, though I know I may not live to. I am looking for words and working a little. I’ll lose my mind a little too, like I do every day, to keep from losing it wholly.

We’ve been talking to home builders about building our home, which seems to be something we’ll be able to do. It seems we’ll be able to plant some trees, build a gray water system to help them, a greenhouse too, for growing food. I’m reading about native plants, how to mitigate soil, how to heal what’s been harmed, and use water wisely. How to re-make the world. How to bring birds.

We’ll do what we can.

Here’s some poems I wrote lately.

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we don’t do math on sundays

infinite by my count, which is admittedly impatient & more often 

than not incorrect, there are possibly, precisely infinite manners of love 

& taking care, among them—asking how many apples & are you okay,

a breath at the door & my softest once through, what it speaks to listen, 

how it smarts to speak, to say, for instance, say it—how the hour here

finds you, however strained, strange or stumbling sideways toward self-

determination, there is no suffering on earth that cannot be shared. 

no strange bird sings alone. this is how i say you are not now, nor will 

you ever be alone. it’s true, a feeling is not a fact. i find it no less real. 

see: my disastrous attempts to feel whole in the morning. a hand 

placed on your back. five minutes of silence for the first time today, 

an end to the silence, a return to me, home. anywhere you are, 

where i am too seems statistically improbable & possible as anything. 

we could have been any way, any place, any time & we are these two,

with so many ways to say i am here.

published in Brawl Lit, July 2024

There’s a recording over there and an interview too, if you’re into those kinds of things.

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A Few More, for the Road

Three Poems in Bullshit Lit: Among other things I enjoy the typefaces Veronica’s chosen for Bullshit. I also enjoy having written that sentence, as I did writing these poems. They’re short, like they tend to be. Go. Read them.

Poem in Porter House Review: I got paid $50 for this(!) and named a finalist for this year’s poetry prize, which was astonishing to me, also lovely. We do a shot of tequila here at home every time we publish something. We did two for this one. Maybe three.

Maybe you’ll do one too and write something for Frozen Sea soon. Tell me why you wouldn’t.

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