Augury
       

                Reader in your dark red car. The starlings hear the dwindle.
They hear the nozzles of a service station's blue pumps rasp,

                the grease trucks filling up behind a neighboring diner, see
every sign raised high on its pole. Read them this way.

                They sing to one another in the tree that overhangs the
world's flat roofs, adjust

                their feathers like a bevy of hatchets.

                Read them this way. The starlings smell famine nearby &
trouble coming the way someone tracking through woods smells rot
in the dark

                & know there is a time to eat and time for exile, that nothing
works here but blood & radio. Murmuration. They unfurl against a
low sky into an open script. & know it is time for you, the sky in dusk
& sign-starred,

                wondrous. Get out, lock your doors. Get scissors & net, climb
a ladder & haul starlings from the wind. Split their caustic chests.
Track where the steam drifts in the light.

Tweet

Copyright © 2019 Ryan Patrick Smith All rights reserved
from The Death Metal Pastorals
Black Lawrence Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission