FISH CROWS

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley

The fish crows in my neighborhood
Are engaged in conversation
Not the sharp caws of their cousins
More of a quiet how are you I am too
In nasal tones that don’t hurt for sounding French
 
Small Andrena mining bees
Are on the wing in Rock Creek Park
Gathering pollen from peppermint striped spring beauty flowers
Then flying home to feed their young
 
An osprey pair is nesting on the Potomac
In a marriage surviving biannual journeys
Of thousands of miles
 
We too are nesting and gathering
And quietly conversing all across America
Wishing to be seen and heard
Or not seen and heard
Wishing to carry on

Melanie Choukas-Bradley is a naturalist and author of several nature books, including City of Trees, A Year in Rock Creek Park, Finding Solace at Theodore Roosevelt Island and Wild Walking—A Guide to Forest Bathing Through the Seasons. Many of her poems have been featured in The New Verse Newsand Beate Sigriddaughter’s Writing in a Woman’s Voice.

DELIVERED

by Julian Matthews

“Dinner With Friends” Painting by Victoria Coleman

A poem on our first meeting after being in a writing workshop on Zoom for six weeks, and in various lockdowns for a year and ten months.

And so we sit at the table partaking of a meal,

the home-made, home-cooked, home-delivered

a gathering of friends, new and old,

unmuted, unzoomed, live, in-person, fully embodied,

greeting each other like refugees

meeting on the dock, our boats having survived

the treacherous crossing of middle class suburbia

and stepping back onto the shores of human connection again, 

wetting our cold feet and lapping up warm chatter about pets, 

pasta, pastries, prices, politics and the pandemic, always the 

     pandemic,

and, thankfully, of our common love of books, and writing and 

     poetry

and missing sitting in darkened theatres with strangers, to watch 

     a movie,

or a play or just chilling with a warm-up, pre-concert cocktail, 

     perhaps a long island tea, 

or two, before listening to an orchestra, fingers fondling keys, 

     bows caressing strings,

lips pressed against mouthpieces, hugging tubas, the tsk-chizz 

     of sticks on cymbals, 

being enveloped by the sensurround sounds of music played by 

     real, in-the-flesh humans...

And in the end there is laughter, ribbing and the teasing out

of each other's backgrounds, our reasons for being, why the 

     need to put words

on rectangular screens, this unboxing of the isolation inside us, 

     this shedding of thickened skins,

double-vaxxed, immunized, and unmasked, fully ensconced in 

     that most singular of human acts,

the Art of Conversation, manifesting our ancestral DNA of 

     gathering around the embers of dying

fires under stars, trading stories, sharing opinions and yes, even 

     gossiping,

just to know we are alive, 

we are still alive.

Julian Matthews is a former journalist finding new ways to express himself in the pandemic through poetry, short stories and essays. He is published in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Nine Cloud Journal, Poor Yorick Journal, Borderless Journal, Second Chance Lit, Poetry and Covid, the anthology Unmasked: Reflections on Virus-time (curated by Shamini Flint), cc&d magazine, a Scars Publication, and forthcoming in the American Journal of Poetry. He is based in Malaysia.