the red-winged black birds
brown-headed cowbirds
starlings
& common grackles are here
roosting in old elm and black walnut trees
talking,
singing
by the way,
they are not common-looking:
their head feathers are a gorgeous
iridescent peacock blue
of course the Crows are here:
they live here

by the way,

i am making a black walnut banana bread
with overripened bananas

i can’t not eat these 3 bananas, somehow;

i cannot give them up to compost, or set them out for possums, raccoons this time / i have to eat them, use them, myself — right this minute

i insist //

have you seen the children’s rib cages, eye sockets, skulls, their femurs

i saw the same emaciation, wasting of my friend’s body / stage 4 metastatic cancer / it was my first time seeing starvation up close and personal

but this is not cellular cancer.

there is a known cure! //

such a lovely sunny warm March day

witnessing our Earth boil, here, there and over there
bystanding to genocide by bullets, bombs and famine over there, there, and there

the immediacy of the hot, red devastation and the cold, grayed devastation on our warm, blue screens ///

we curate by the heart, crushing the algorithm; an insistent, persistent, consistent vow to not look away, to bear witness, to write, to call out, to demand

let me be steady, synchronous, cacophonous as blackbirds

at all this hot terror, the singeing, the hunger, the rubble, the ruins, metastasizing

these holocausts, these cancers //

while i bake a black walnut banana bread,

to the sounds of blackbirds