Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem, every Thursday.

The Busyness of Birds

You told me that
becoming pungent, full of pregnant birds
was the way to make shadows of easels
that paint our shadows’ inner monologues.
Pregnant light and how birds can see but we,
not knowing, run
through mossy avenues and alleys,
our way of killing death before death
tongue kisses us first. Crows really must
know what busyness gets us off the hook.
That’s why we say a murder and write them off.
We take to airways what
we cannot know but approximate
in the name of home, salad days,
familiarity of fights in a Waffle House.
I dip my Cajun boil in sky
and water my relief with the nothing that
can destroy the fabric of green light
underlying New Orleans, and a swamp
overdosed with drowning.
Eat the larger pie:
it no longer wants us,
for lineages to come most likely.
The devil is drowning his details
when they’re easily recollected.
Turn the static up, amp a harassing self confidence,
follow this white tulip
of the Second Line down any underwater boulevard.
 

Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Women’s National Book Association (WNBA) Award. Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize winner. She’s co-editor of the anthology Big Energy Poets: Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change and the anthology series, Bettering American Poetry. King is a professor of creative writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx