Five Blackbirds: Random Meanderings While Scrutinizing a Shrunken World - Julie Allyn Johnson
It’s the last day of March
and still, she’s unable
(or unwilling)
to make up her mind.
Lamb. Lion.
Pangolin. Feral cat.
Sea urchin.
Does it matter?
A quintet
of draped blackness
swoops down
from a fickle sky.
Three lodge themselves
among the winter-bare
branches of a honey locust.
One promptly flies off,
its disinterest in social
distancing sufficiently obvious.
Numero cinco pecks
at the lifeless remnants
of last year’s lawn,
oblivious to gerrymandered
inequities.
Recent highlights
to brighten her short hair
(neglected for too long)
are a bit severe.
Is that Kato Kaelin’s long-lost
sister she sees
in her bathroom mirror
every morning?
Fried egg for breakfast
with a banana chaser
and she forgets about it for now.
What else can she do?
Five blackbirds number, now,
into the hundreds, perhaps
a thousand or more. Maybe
even hundreds of thousands.
Locust branches no longer entice.
They descend upon snow-flattened
grasses, weary from the weight of
December leaning into January
and the cold months that followed.
Each sleek blob of black,
stark against the bitter wind,
cries out against the injustice
prevailing upon them, endless
gusts of a continued frigid
air mass, stinging missiles
of Iowa farmland, projectiles
piercing every beady little eye.
Rain’s coming in
from the south.
She draws her hoodie up
over her ears, crosses to the mailbox
hoping for some small surprise:
letters from old friends,
this month’s Poets & Writers,
fabric she’d ordered
but forgotten, a contributor’s
copy hawking her last
acceptance.
Nothing.
She’s met with emptiness.
How apropos.
Originally published by Blackbirds, Lyrebirds, Weaverbirds, a Children, Churches & Daddies publication, in both print and online, December 2023
Julie Allyn Johnson is a sawyer's daughter from the American Midwest whose current obsession is tackling the rough and tumble sport of quilting and the accumulation of fabric. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her poetry can be found in Star*Line, The Briar Cliff Review, Phantom Kangaroo, Lyrical Iowa, Moss Piglet, Bulb Culture Collective, Coffin Bell, The Lake, Haikuniverse, Chestnut Review and other journals. Julie enjoys photography and writing daily haiku, both of which can be found on her blog, A Sawyer’s Daughter.
