"Those Black Birds"

by Devon Balwit

“Those black birds?  Those are ravens.  There are still a few colonies of them that nest on the island; they’ll be extinct unless another war comes soon.” -The Island of Second Sight, Albert Vigoleis Thelen

Those who feed off death will never
        go extinct, all prayer unable

to withstand the daily urge to fatten
        by the ones who stroke

steel barrels & not yet ripened
        clusters of green grenades

nestled in sawdust, all the while imagining
        the wealth & welter of still bodies.

Those dark scouts never want
        for beacons, one fire kindling

the next, celebrating death to the last
        knucklebone, then, remasked,

profiting from the rebar to rebuild, the pitch
        that clags bones into roads

for future tanks, clapping
        their own backs as heroes.  

Devon Balwit is from Portland, OR. She has two chapbooks: How the Blessed Travel (Maverick Duck Press) & Forms Most Marvelous (forthcoming with dancing girl press). Her work has found many homes, some of which are: Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, The Stillwater Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Red Earth Review, Panoplyzine, and The Inflectionist Review.

Click here to read: "Those Black Birds"