The Zingara Project

Tag: Birds

  • Releasing the Dark Landscape by Martin Willitts Jr

    The last sunlight falls behind the vanishing trees,
    where it hesitates before leaving completely.
    Some decisions are measured by regret.
    Some of us, when we find ourselves old, notice this.

    Out on the prairie, someone tries to hold the land
    together with barbed wire stapled to aging wood posts.
    however I am the kind of person who brings cutters
    and snip each sharp wire, and let the fields open.

    I am the kind who encourages yellow-throated meadowlarks.
    When cut, the dark will be released; the air will be set free.
    Doors on distanced houses ripple like muscles after working.
    Some wonder why I do this, question idleness as the cause,

    suggest I had nothing better to do. I am the kind laws
    are made to discourage people like me from acting impulsively.
    I cannot obey, and sharpen the blades like a raptor’s talons.
    I am the kind that knows outcrops sweeten with silence.

    I go to the wire to test it. It glints in moonlight and speaks.
    It knows the quiet patterns of flight, the tactical for listening.
    I should have brought the cutter, it slender purpose of justice,
    the rusting wind caught on it should be freed. I touch barehanded.

    It slices like eyes. It whispers, be careful. The fields, spare me.
    Yearning and ceasing are shadows lengthening, in stillness,
    in the final ambient light, then, the meadowlark stopped —
    only the robin’s sleepy-time sound is in this field, and it is held here.

    I experience the necessary absence. I also lose blood to its danger.
    They say actions speak for you and what you stand for.
    I have been listening to the suffering. Something had to be done.
    When I cut, the earth flies away, like wings or leaves or regret.
    ___

    Martin Willitts Jr. has 11 full-length collections including “How to Be Silent” (FutureCycle Press, 2016). His forthcoming include “Dylan Thomas and the Writing Shed” (FutureCycle Press); “Three Ages of Women” (Deerbrook Press); and the winner of the Editor’s Choice Award, “The Wire Fence Holding Back the World” (Turtle Island Press).

  • Water’s Edge by Joe Amaral

    I came upon a creek,
    following deer trail scampering by
    fire-swirled poison oak, dapper sycamore
    and bone smooth cottonwood

    I heard mallards, snowy egrets
    and my favorite, silverblack coots,
    lounging in shallow water as if
    they were toweled old men at a sauna

    What surprised me was the angel-feathered body
    guarded by a hunchbacked hawk
    glaring back at me like a guilty vampire atop
    his hapless victim, pecking at its beanpole neck

    The bird of prey blasted into the trees, perching
    on a branch, angrily observing my approach
    Beside the shore of moss, mud and stone
    lay supine a juvenile duck with a grotesquely

    twisted head, its webbed feet pedaling
    midair like an upturned bicycle
    Its agonal, guppy breathing and distantly dim
    flaxen eyes clutching my dutiful heart

    It was barely alive, a dollop of blood upon its throat
    Turkey vultures double and triple looped above me,
    so many there must have been bigger game to ply
    I sighed and stepped over the poor gasping creature

    It was able to crane its crooked neck and regard me,
    beak opening and closing in broken respiration,
    akin to a hatchling beckoning wormy regurgitation
    But I could only offer it reincarnation so I stomped

    my foot down on its head as hard as I could
    A crepitus of sound of sharp gravel cleaved the sky
    the same moment the hawk burst out the foliage
    and flew away, chasing the soul only it could see

    Joe Amaral splits his time spelunking around the California central coast as a paramedic and stay-at-home dad to two saucy little girls.  His poetry and short stories have appeared in awesome places around the world.  Joe also won the 2014 Ingrid Reti Literary Award.

  • Great Blue Heron by Roy Beckemeyer

    dead snag along the
    edge of the creek
    unfolds like a parasol opening,
    squawks  effort, pulls
    gangly
    legs
    that
    trail
    like
    reeds
    behind him, white lime of feces
    streak  onto water like an afterthought,
    wide wings mask the road of sky
    between the trees, a deep whoosh
    so thick with flapping
    you have to suck
    at your breath,
    cramp
    your
    diaphragm,
    catch and swallow
    that air before
    it curls away
    into the eddies
    of his leaving.
    —

    Roy Beckemeyer’s poems have appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, The North Dakota Review, Coal City Review, and I-70 Review.  He was a 2016 Pushcart nominee, and his collection of poems, “Music I Once Could Dance To” (Coal City Review and Press, 2014), was selected as a 2015 Kansas Notable Book.

     

     

     

     

  • How does the rooster know when to crow by Rae Marie Taylor

    and the fly to start buzzing
    right now
    How do they and
    all the birdsongs know to stop
    and wait

    while the sun
    climbs up the other side of
    Kitchen Mesa sending rose glints
    into the sky
    but not yet, not quite touching
    the soft red earth
    where I stand
    two ravens know to swoon
    past with a soft, throaty greeting
    quickening trills and twitters
    there in the gulch
    below

    the sun’s glowing
    right now
    the purest white
    down the Dakota Sandstone
    caressing
    purple mudstone
    where fossils still lie.
    —
    Rae Marie Taylor performs on Spoken Word stages in Quebec and the American Southwest. Author of the poetry CD Black Grace, Rae’s The Land: Our Gift and Wild Hope also won the 2014 Colorado Independent Publishers’ Merit Award and was Finalist in the 2013 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards (environment).

  • Take the Apple by Michelle Holland

    Drag out books with dog-eared pages, find thatIMG_0924
    quote to make some sense of Adam and Eve,
    the doctrine of apple trees and the real
    story of knowledge. Take the apple not
    just to eat, but cast the seeds and make sure
    to spread them wide along the paths. Seek out
    that birdsong found on an ipod matching
    the birdsong from the lush cottonwood down
    by the ditch, to know a Bullock’s Oriole.
    Notice the canary-yellow bottom
    of a brilliant white sego lily
    balanced on its slender stalk. Truth rises
    in spits and starts, our own bird call, a trill
    of thought where the hummingbirds whirr and dive.

    —

    Michelle Holland has two collections of poetry, “Event Horizon,” included in The Sound a Raven Makes, (Tres Chicas Press) \ New Mexico Book Award winner 2009, and Chaos Theory, (Sin Fronteras Press).  She is co-poetry editor of the Sin Fronteras Journal, and treasurer of the New Mexico Literary Arts Board.