Poetry by Konrad Ehresman
In the dark I hear the owl in my attic,
three beating thrums and a woosh,
screeching,
the sound of wings confined.
In the light,
I collect stray feathers
and celebrate silence.
Every day I think it gone,
but
every night,
the gift,
of being wrong.
I tell my family
but they can’t hear it,
say my mind is playing tricks,
I wonder where my brain mastered illusion,
how it chose
owl over
dove.
I could just show them,
pull on dangling cord,
turn shut door to yawning mouth,
bathe in the vindicating warmth of trapped air,
watch an owl erupt
from the parted lips of our house.
But I worry,
when I ask the attic to speak,
that it will refuse an audience,
that it will share only,
quiet settled into dust.
And I worry,
they will pity me as
I write pleas in the grime,
beg stale air to let them hear,
to teach them the music
of flying into walls,
the song of soaring
while starving.
But mostly,
I worry that if we look,
I might come to find,
there was no owl,
and the noise
is
mine.
Konrad Ehresman is a creative living on the central coast of California. His work has been featured by Ariel Chart, Awakened Voices, You Might Need to Hear This, and he has work upcoming in Mocking Owl Roost. When not writing Konrad can be found baking bread and being a nuisance.
