It’s quiet here, where the river broadens, by the dropped
drawbridge and the distant eight-girl crews, coasting to the
finish line, forming a bar graph that could represent
favored activities (listening to jazz comes in
last, sand volleyball and Margaritas win.) It’s calm
until the geese-feeders arrive with sacks of stale and
crumbled Wonder. And the geese converge and clack-attack
one another when supplies grow scarce, as it to give
beak-service to tooth and claw poetics. And as the
nipped ones shrug it off, and the aggressors present fresh
unruffled feathers to new arrivals, some Black-capped
Chickadees hop in beneath the squabble, to capture
the crumbs, like old B-list poets thieving the classics.
Leonard Kress has published fiction and poetry in Missouri Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, etc. His recent collections are Walk Like Bo Diddley and Living in the Candy Store and Other Poems and a new verse translation of the Polish Romantic epic, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz. Craniotomy Sestinas appeared last winter. He teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia. www.leonardkress.com
