December - Poem 22
Snowy Owls Delight Birders on Chicago’s Lakefront / Kate Bowers
For Abigail
He loved her and married her there in Positano above the sea. The only thing she had packed was her gauzy white dress, which she almost forgot on the plane rushing down the aisle to meet him on the runway after she landed.
And when they left their Brooklyn loft several years later for another city in the States, they left it all—every fork and pan, the leather couch, half their clothing, taking only the dog, really, and what could fit in their carry-on luggage.
Did I mention neither of them was Italian? That she was extraordinarily beautiful and had been wooed properly across New England over two fall seasons, not unlike those old Gilmore Girl stories we had grown up watching so assiduously? That he was from money and tech savvy?
For several years, they were together. She gave up performing for reporting and strangely went back to graduate school in the middle of everything —the game nights, the new dog, the whimsical jaunts to cities in South America since they presently lived so closely to it.
We grew used to their peripatetic life. After all, they lived along the horizon now, and as we aged, we lost patience with squinting.
Still, his birthday reminders came up regularly on the calendar, this last one arriving with baby news. However, the photo wasn’t of her. She had the same long, luscious hair, but this was a new girl, a new city. He had married this one on a mountaintop above the desert in a town where they purchased new forks.
And we didn’t know what had happened to Maria.
A couple of years later, I saw Maria’s work online. She was a full-time reporter now in Chicago with news about the rare sighting of two Snowy Owls—mates who had flown south from their native Arctic Tundra and were resting on the Montrose Pier along Lake Michigan’s shoreline.
“These birds have an interruptive pattern of migration; sometimes we see them, sometimes we don’t,” she reported and then explained this particular species of bird prefers open spaces like the Chicago shoreline over treed areas and that they nest along the ground in bowl shapes they carve into the earth over a few days’ time.
She went on to note the owls feed four rodents a day to their chicks, known as owlets, their preferred food is the lemming, and the size of the available lemming population dictated the number of eggs the birds would lay each year. Possibly, this was a slow lemming year in the Arctic, and the birds were seeking a better food supply flying so close to this heavily populated area along the lake.
Her footage included a clip of a male owl swooping down upon a lemming having a meal of grass and twigs on the tundra and lifting it up into the sky dangling almost tenderly from the bird’s talons, like a small and well-loved teddy bear dragging from the hand of a toddler.
Presumably, the owl had broken the back of the lemming at once when he grabbed it, and the rodent felt nothing as it was pecked apart still inexpertly by the owlets in the nest.
This happened more than once in the clip without any coyness. The lemmings never seemed to try to escape, just followed one after the other through the air to be eaten.
A local birder named John who had been keeping vigil on shore over four days came on screen next, talking about the rarity of seeing two Snowy Owls so close to his home. “I’ve been waiting for this for twelve years,” he said, “It’s one of the greatest lifers ever.” (A lower third ran across the bottom of the screen informing the viewer the term “lifer” is birder talk for a first, in-person sighting of a species as he spoke.). This was a first sighting for him. You never forget your first.
It was December 22 when I saw the segment, three days before Christmas. None of us were ready. The birds were white beautiful and were the talk of the cocktail parties now, a pleasant switch from holiday tropes and the ridiculous obsession among our circle with that novel Playworld that had been so popular last year, though none of our friends seemed to have actually read it, certainly not I.
My Universe / Katie Collins
My feet are cold
My heart is heavy
The sky is empty
Any stars that once lived there
Have found a new space to occupy
Can you see them wherever you ended up?
Or is your sky as empty as mine?
7 oz. Odense Marzipan Almond Candy Dough / Ellen Ferguson
We walked to the corner
Clinking candy canes with Caprice,
Former Miss Teen Australia,
Catching bright windowed studios midtown.
You offered me
she declined,
Leaving me on the F train, my new home for now.
We three
former beauties:
You, your marzipan, that yawning studio in Midtown East.
Miss Teen Australia broke the marzipan mold:
still the almond joy of her youth tiny waist pasted on lush hips.
Odense, birthing both Hans Christian Anderson &
Earth’s densest ingredient: malleable beyond buttercream, rarely igniting passion.
Understanding / Chris Fong Chew
1. This text is to be read by your eyes only, no one else shall read this text
2. The you referred to in the first statement is the plural type, meaning anyone can read this text
3. Anyone by that I mean, those that can read english, that can read the language I am typing in
4. perhaps not that I intend for those that cannot read english to not be able to read this text
5. But I think it important to acknowledge the limitations of my writing and audience
6. 如果我用中文，你不能讀
7. 但是你可以讀英文
8. 你明白嗎？
9. What is language except prescribed meanings to strings of lines on a page
10. What about lines on a screen, etched into a rock, carved into a stone
11. What is language when you can understand me
12. What is language when you can't understand me
13. Who are you to say I am not understandable, perhaps you are not educated enough
14. But who am I to say that one is educated or not educated
15. When people live their whole lives in another language, another script
16. A whole world existing with another set of sounds and lines on pages, screens, etched in rocks
17. (some language don't even have a written form)
18. sound waves )))))))))))))))))) pushing )))))))))))) through the air
19. If I cannot write you then how can you understand me
20.
21. did you understand me?
22. perhaps without the written language I must accept that you can only understand when you are close
23. (likethisclose)
24. (orthatclose)
25. what is a space but a condensation of meaning in emptiness
26. space has meaning becuase without it how would you know
27. ifiamwritingasentenceoraword
28. america or am erica?
29. language is an identity crisis
30. do you understand?
Nostalgia is not scurvy / Davis Hicks
Don’t do as the body demands,
remembering all but
rest
holding accountable only the
exhale,
but not the intaken,
honest breath.
Forgetting can be a blessing for those
who wrong
including
against themselves.
Yesterdays can raisin,
shriveled from the season-sun of so many droughted days.
Or worse, be distilled
with clarity
only good
for burning.
Flickers, those half-twitch hieroglyphics
love to convince us in top-down fashion
the vitality of building,
forgetting that even something
so sharply beautiful
is still
a tomb.
Don’t forget the cocoons,
the sleds resting in
the slain snow.
We cannot afford
to remember only the
bitter-breath,
to abandon the watermelon and split-lips,
to pretend
we can hold
anything
other
than hands.
2 / Victor Barnuevo Velasco
Is there time
to gather the gardenias
I tended for three
summers -- from which
brown anoles drank
rain and hatched
their eggs? The same
flowers I arranged
in a blue glass
and placed next
to your bed -- until
a lizard crawled out.
You said, sweep
it fast -- it belongs
outside. I scooped it
with my hands, gently.
It sprang and crowned
your head.
Beautiful things / Jen Wagner
I write of the violence
of beautiful things.
The dark.
And the lovely.
And the desire it brings.
The gentle and soft
With the claws and the teeth.
The sweet smelling roses
With thorns underneath.
The danger that calls me
To the edge of my fears.
As i dive into love
And risk drowning in tears.
Chasing blue eyes
That see deep to my soul.
Hands that grip firmly
Yet so softly they hold.
It is longing and loathing.
And beautifully brave.
As I hand myself over
To both pleasure and pain
So deeply I’m rooted
In the knowledge I keep
Without violence , no beauty.
No dreams without sleep.
Holding On / Stacy Walker
I want to believe…
But flying reindeer?
Some people say
It’s our moms and dads.
I think it could be,
But could it?
They couldn’t have given
My gecko
A new cage
In the middle of the night.
I don’t think he’s real,
But he knew
I tried to stay up late
To see him last year.
It doesn’t make
Any sense at all
But I wrote my letter,
Made my list,
And can’t wait
To leave cookies,
Carrots,
And candy canes,
Because did you know,
That’s what elves like to eat?
There’s a Santa Tracker,
You know,
And I wonder
How that works.
I want to believe.
