I think we are a lot more like birds than we are like frogs
An olive pit in your beak the color of your negroni swooping over melting me becoming a shadow a flock of starlings just arrowing over our roof at dusk you disappear among them until it is time for me to move away and now you are the shadow and I am the olive pit you spit into the river.
To the Catbird Calling Me Trite
With your wing splayed across your belly, my essay on the table blotted in red, you said, “if you want to be a poet, just go do that, but if you want to be a copywriter—” your beak mechanically springing open and closed as I cry on the stone bench outside the classroom next to the angel statue without a nose, you peck at a lone French fry underneath me without offering to share, because I was not born a catbird.
One Day the Raven Will Inherit the Earth I never met a raven who didn’t fancy blood until you called in a panic when your roommate puked blood all over the bathroom and you didn’t want to clean it up while she was in the hospital but really had to pee hanging up the phone to call me back an hour later to say you prayed on it, with bleach and divine intervention when you’d rather scavenge for frisbees or twitter bible verses at some unsuspecting woman while stealing tea through your beak from the four star restaurant across the street from the dive bar with the stuffed polar bear where you made me believe you were an extraordinary being until, like Noah said, one day you fled and never came back. I read one day when we are dead you will inherit the earth. I hope by then, you get over blood.
Amy holds an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics where she founded Wisdom Body Collective. She is an editor of More Revolutionary Letters: A Tribute to Diane di Prima. Her work can be read/is forthcoming in Entropy, Vol1 Brooklyn, Denver Quarterly, TYPO, Full-Stop and elsewhere. @amybobeda on twitter.