Photo by Kyle Hinkson on Unsplash
At dinner I catch myself chair swaying to the bass line of “Another One Bites the Dust.” This is a song birds would dance to on the internet. I believe in my bones I know what they like. Despite never owning a bird or even knowing their names. I know, I know, bad poet. I posted a pic of a striking bird family on my fire escape. My writer friend commented, OMG YOU HAVE AMERICAN KESTELS ON YOUR WINDOWSILL!!! I had almost labeled the post, Cool pigeons. I don’t know the names of trees either.
But I’ve always had a special bond with birds. Years ago at Tenney Park in Madison when it wasn’t winter, I’d go listen to the ducks lampoon the world so often that they’d waddle up and sit with me, though I never fed them. One let me pet its emerald neck. Just last week I took my writing class to Central Park to observe “nature” and went off on my own, the true reason for the trip. I’d had a bad day, department meeting, So you’re saying that the provost’s subcommittee on best practices for classroom inclusivity is by invitation only? Correct. I listened to a rat wheeze under a tree crotch, then spied a robin standing on a concrete path with its matchstick legs. We locked eyes. It cocked its head to the side and shat. I sighed, Exactly.
After dinner I googled “birds dancing to music” and saw a cockatoo headbanging its yellow mohawk while Freddie Mercury growled, strutting to the beat of the Same. Exact. Song. Now in meetings while colleagues debate the efficacy of rubrics used to evaluate student artifacts, I’ll smile. Daydream myself a modern St. Francis of Assisi who lives in the forest, or at least Central Park, with a plastic sack of Wonderbread and a boombox. My comrades and I listen to my mix of curated songs, bob our heads, strut and preen like our Queen on stage at Wembley Stadium.
Carrie Conners, originally from West Virginia, lives in Queens, NY and teaches English at LaGuardia CC-CUNY. Her book, Luscious Struggle, (BrickHouse Books 2019) was selected as a 2020 Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Bodega, Glass, Quiddity, RHINO, and The Monarch Review, among other publications. She is also a poetry reader for Epiphany.