The Reading
5000 species of birds make their way into your room and hover over your bed and your
desk, begging for a few lines of poetry.
You are tired so you tell them you’ve burned all your books. You’ve torn out all the
pages, you say. But they’re not buying it. They want the best one – “the only poem,” they
repeat.
You fake a migraine and turn to face the wall but by now, they have turned on all the
lights and eaten their way through your kitchen. Your refrigerator door hangs off one
hinge – the light perpetually shining.
What about the library? You suggest, Have you tried the coffeehouses? The colleges?
They insist that you are the reader they’ve come for.
Finally, naked (because their pecking has torn off your clothes) and bloody (those claws,
talons & beaks – my god! those beaks!) you open the book and your mouth to recite.
The chorus is a concert of wings, a cacophony of feathers. I can’t hear you over the noise.
By JodiAnn Stevenson
JodiAnn Stevenson teaches poetry and writing at Delta College near Saginaw, Michigan. Her poetry, flash fiction and memoir pieces have appeared in numerous online and print journals since 1996. She is the author of three chapbooks of poetry: The Procedure, published by March Street Press in 2005; Houses Don’t Float, published by Habernicht Press in 2010; and Diving Headlong Into A Cliff Of Our Own Delusion, published by Saucebox Books in 2011. Her poem, “A Thousand Birds” won the Nassau Review’s Readers’ Awards in Prose Poetry in 2012. JodiAnn is also the founding and managing editor of Binge Press and 27 rue de fleures, the Slam Master of the Saginaw Slam, and curator of her online gallery of visual poetics, Bowl of Milk.
