All day, crows. From the fog, from the unbroken
bough, crows. And me? One crow away from crone—
hair wild, old robe open and coffee-stained, I run
to meet their iridescent craws with fistfuls
of walnuts and fistfuls of pecans, and when these run
out, with a cooled skillet of scrambled eggs.
Do you think they know? a love asks. I mean,
where eggs come from? And because I want her to love
crows as much as I do, to pity them after so many
trees fell with that rain fell and fell and kept
falling, I shrug, say nothing of the sudden
spear of their bills into jay nests, nothing
of a mob raiding an owl’s perfectly round clutch,
nothing of what we call them—a murder—
when what we mean is their family.
And aren’t you worried about your porch?
The mess, she says. The shells, all that bird shit?
And I answer by saying I read crows
give to each crow their own crow name,
tell her the scatter and smear is well worth
the chance to decode that spell. What I don’t say
is baby crows have mouths as pink as our own
that blacken as they mature, that I believe
if I could pronounce those sounds, the inside
of my mouth would make itself into the night
after long night after that storm,
how my mouth would black out
for miles as our city did, giving birth
to what was there before, to what was
hidden there all along. No. What I mean is
with the electricity wiped out, the night was terrifying
but full of stars, and when the grid came back, I was
oddly disappointed, made as I was star-lonely
all over again. Even now I don’t know how to name
a thing, especially what is to come, so instead I run
out each morning, pretend to speak
their dry-tongued chords—gritty, insistent, taking back
the sky we thought we knew but mostly
ignored. And sometimes, I swear
they answer with the storm’s true name—not Helene
but a charge calling forth who really is to
blame. It is a name that is and is not the same
as the one they’ve given me, a name I recognize
better than my mother-given own, a name
that might figure how we might
survive this time.
—
Nickole Brown is author of Sister as well as Fanny Says, which won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. To Those Who Were Our First Gods won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published in 2020. Currently, she lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several animal sanctuaries and is President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets. Every summer, she teaches as part of the low-residency MFA Program at the Sewanee School of Letters.
