After all these years, the poem still remembers you: a mourning dove
alights on a telephone wire, calls other mourning doves.
My daughter wakes early, carries cereal to the porch of the AirBnB.
She watches the sky go from black to gray to mourning doves.
The loggerhead shrike “impales its prey (lizards, insects) on thorns.”
This seems both clever and dickish, I confess to the mourning dove.
True story: your “crop,” an esophageal storage sac,
can hold 1,000 millet seeds. Don’t sneeze, mourning dove!
Hunters “harvest” 20 million of your siblings each year.
Exemplar of grief, so much cause for mourning, dove.
Jo, your past lives are boring. Forget Joan of Arc, the lover’s shove—
with any luck, you were a mourning dove.
This poem first appeared in Temporary Beast (2024).
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Joanna Solfrian is the author of the poetry collections Temporary Beast, The Second Perfect Number, The Mud Room, and Visible Heavens, which was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Wick First Book Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Harvard Review, Boulevard, Rattle, Margie, The Southern Review, Salamander, Pleiades, Image, and elsewhere. She is a MacDowell Fellow and a five-time Pushcart nominee. Joanna lives and works in New York City. www.joannasolfrian.com
