[SUNDAY] and [MONDAY MORNING]

Issue 49 • Spring 2024 • Poetry

Third place winner in the Spring 2024 Contest Issue judged by Shayla Lawson

[SUNDAY]

You ran over a squirrel on the way back from dropping me off this morning. It wasn’t your fault. I know you love everything alive. You understand reverence. On the drive I read bell hooks, and wanted to talk to you about what she thinks it means to love, but instead I kept my mouth shut. I am learning that not everything needs to be said right away. Sometimes talking is a trick of the light. Sometimes pressing my tongue against my teeth is just a simple reflex from childhood.

On the way home we passed dozens of signs for city council elections. A cop followed us for a mile, your palms growing sweaty on the steering wheel. The mundane felt electric. These days, I love to be dull. If killing the little animal was a bad omen, I propose we take our licks with some measure of grace. Let us hold on to the day with unclenched fingers. Let us turn our attention to what bores us, and, in deepening our devotion to it, let it change us.

[MONDAY MORNING]

The fog rolling down the hill covered the skyline like a fist coming down on a table. Menacing, almost. The sunrise, all blue and pale orange, struggled for space in the frame. Behind the cloud cover, starlings whipped about in lockstep formation. Mary Oliver once called starlings improbable, beautiful, and afraid of nothing. I think of this whenever I see the noisy black birds: afraid of nothing. What a line. I wish I wrote it, but I didn’t, so I jot it down in a ratty old notebook I’ll rediscover in a year and call it good.

How do the starlings know how to fly together like that? It’s called murmuration. When they move they look like one perfect undulating body, but there are thousands of them. They know how to mimic car alarms and human speech patterns. They love to drink nectar. They lay baby blue eggs.

I am here to see the birds in the pre-dawn because I made the mistake of trying to love a violent man, and now I have to lick my wounds. It is not a new story or an interesting one. Did you know that people who read Marx and call themselves leftists can also hit women? I didn’t, but now I do. Once I wrote a poem about how he ran over a squirrel and felt bad about it, but the truth is, he didn’t care. Only I did. In the poem we get to turn people into beautiful things, whether or not they deserve it. Anyways, the birds.

The starlings don’t care about my sadness, and that’s my favorite thing about them. They flock together, pitch black and dense, and then fan out against the sky, now morning. Where they are headed is none of my business. They’ll put on this display somewhere else, and someone else will gaze up at the horizon in wonderment before grabbing a coffee and catching their bus. When spring arrives, they’ll nest, and suddenly: thousands of baby blue eggs. What a beautiful world, one that does not need me at all.

Contest judge Shayla Lawson on “[SUNDAY] and [MONDAY MORNING]”:
The pleasure in this poem is how its slow reverie evolves. Under its quotidian subtext is a poet who is learning to contemplate the world anew through reading, a portal that has steered so many of us toward authorship. This poem possesses the rare quality of making one smile as it reveals its observations. Just as the poet ascertains, ‘Sometimes talking is a trick of the light.’

Issue 49 • Spring 2024

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry