Tag: owl

The Gift Box

Poetry by Theresa Wyatt

My sister sends me
Charley Harper stickers
for my birthday

and a card
of his painting
Hawk Mountain.

At once the dominant
dark brown owl atop a pole,
staring straight at me, fixates
my gaze dead center – and I reason

the artist knows I’ll shift my glance
to track the blue sky and visually fly
east to west, then north & south
through this calm sanctuary

of whimsical hawks in profile – sporting
tuxedo style, well-dressed wing spans
in black, brown & white stripes
of impeccable spacing,

oh, these striking creatures –
immortalized now in soy-based ink
& magical realism – descendants of raptors,
millennia in the making.


Theresa Wyatt is the author of “The Beautiful Transport” (Moonstone Press) and “Hurled Into Gettysburg” (BlazeVox Books). Her writing follows the tug of history, nature, and art. Her poems have appeared in the Elm Leaves JournalNorton’s New MicroSpillway, and the Press 53 anthology, “What Dwells Between the Lines.”

Aviary

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.

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