| words that get in your teeth

With No Apologies to the World or the Ether by Jonathan Yungkans

after John Ashbery

 

The birds opened their coffee klatch in earnest,

chatting the sky from black to blue in maybe

a hundred singing telegrams. I sipped coffee

 

and eavesdropped on the overlapping timbres

and turns of phrase in their feathered acrobatics.

Pick-up trucks grumbled past, into Wednesday,

 

more mind-reader than machine for engines

which sounded more like driver’s complaints

than random idling. Amid the light twittering,

 

a raven sounded a bass note twice. The other

birds stopped. Paused to listen? A long silence.

A second raven answered, more like laughing.

Copyright 2021. Gnashing Teeth Publishing by movementmarketing.us

Gnashing Teeth Publishing

PO Box 143


Rockport TX 78381

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