{"id":476,"date":"2012-11-20T01:55:19","date_gmt":"2012-11-20T01:55:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sporkpress.com\/poetry\/?p=476"},"modified":"2012-11-20T01:55:19","modified_gmt":"2012-11-20T01:55:19","slug":"from-brown-thrashers-by-hugh-behm-steinberg-pt-1-of-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/2012\/11\/20\/from-brown-thrashers-by-hugh-behm-steinberg-pt-1-of-2\/","title":{"rendered":"From Brown Thrashers by Hugh Behm-Steinberg (pt. 1 of 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brown Thrashers<\/strong>
\n 
\n 
\nFound in vegetation, in hedgerows, old fields, and wood edges foraging on the ground;
\nthe ground tells the birds I\u2019m still a bride, even before you were born I was still a bride.
\n 
\nI get picked, and picked, and turn right in the dark.
\nOne of us is delicate, one is an ear, one of us is a house with hair growing out of its eaves.
\n 
\nBe more perpendicular have wideawake dreams where you talk and what you say gets hard, for
\nwhen a snake is asleep he\u2019s the worst snake in the world, even the worms mock him.
\n 
\nMight as well have a head made of hazel wood, this land is the advertisement for this land:
\nits farmers work so shamefully hard, brown thrashers echo their cries.
\n 
\nAs ghosts and the battery operated beings of the world, there are several others I cannot see long enough to identify, so I\u2019m big again; they make me eat fire again.
\n 
\nOh babe, I say, I don\u2019t want to die in Houston, unless it\u2019s in your arms;
\nyou say God worries all the time so we don\u2019t have to.
\n 
\nThe dogs kiss everyone it\u2019s no big deal dogs open to loving anyone;
\nit\u2019s a way they undermine being owned.
\n 
\nSo my neighbor is having an affair, I can hear her fucking while her husband\u2019s at work;
\nthe yard full of flies: no one\u2019s taking care of the chickens.
\n 
\nMove to the country, from the country to the country, to even more country, to a wilderness, on the coast of it. Then be on a boat, watching a gang of sailfish get liberated by their organizational skills.
\n 
\nWhat is a song? A song is a long series of phrases, uttered twice, separated by pauses.
\nMy call note is a “tchuck” like a smacking kiss. Oh incredible racket of love!
\n 
\n 
\n_______________________________________
\nIvory Billed Woodpecker<\/strong>
\n 
\n 
\nSome ghost erasing its ghost, whose ghost resists with all its might, being you.
\nYou don\u2019t know you\u2019re doing this. Tell your ghost there\u2019s a river here, can\u2019t you smell the turbulance? Don\u2019t you feel it pulling you?
\n 
\nRather be a fish than a ghost, rather be a magnolia forest than a ghost, a bottle with a note wedged inside it instead of a ghost.
\n 
\nIs or was one of the largest. It goes away because you killed it it comes back but it hides from you.
\n 
\nSpend your best American money and defend the emotional against the avant-garde who want to sleep with everyone and never have to pay for it.
\n 
\nThere are no unambiguous photographs, videos, specimens, or DNA samples from feathers or feces of the Ivory-billed woodpecker but we know its there.
\n 
\nIt\u2019s the bottom of the 2nd inning and Kyle Kendrick is pitching against the Florida Marlins.
\nI say ghost bird and you come to me. I have a lot of faith you can circle nearby even if you\u2019re resisting what I\u2019m telling you.
\n 
\nThe spirit is a pole, a teacup, you as you grow old, a fold, an ivory billed woodpecker saying.
\nI\u2019m here this is what I sound like before they made a cartoon character out of me.
\n 
\nAt times primeval hardwood forests cover the earth, and they would never flock,
\npreferring solitude when peeling the bark off dead trees. Crossing your arms around your purse I got something I want to show you.
\n 
\nWe pair for life. I pull the night shift while you sleep. Inhabitants of the forest we live in think we\u2019re crazy, So we go to a psychiatrist, a wolf with a Scottish accent, and it\u2019s great until we find out he\u2019s extinct too.
\n 
\n 
\n_____________________________________
\nHugh Behm-Steinberg<\/strong> is the author of Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books) and The Opposite of Work (JackLeg Press, forthcoming December 2012). His poems can be found in such places as Crowd, VeRT, Volt, Cue, Slope, Aught, Fence, dirt, Ditch, Nap, Forge, Swerve and Zeek, as well as few places with more than one syllable. He teaches writing at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where he edits the journal Eleven Eleven.
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brown Thrashers     Found in vegetation, in hedgerows, old fields, and wood edges foraging on the ground; the ground tells the birds I\u2019m still a bride, even before you were born I was still a bride.   I get picked, and picked, and turn right in the dark. One of us is delicate, one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-things"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}