This is how Catherine Moore’s poem “Healing Birds” should have looked when it appeared in our Fall 2008 issue. Many apologies to Catherine for the goof-up.
a brave sleep palliative flat slightly sick day shining
up the medical sky thick with leaves worry
beads to usher in the forces that work to see
it goes on instructed to let a lamp low
this was going to take the place of going to the park
or store this was a simple palliative
when the separate fury
of my hope took over it was possible to repeat that
as a piece of theater a shout like a mad doll of sand
it makes inside a kind of kind clear violence
of the bead only mush extracts from the head clay
hideous retablo on the walls of our hands the belief in where
money will go backwaters of a big fork of water
explanations from government make a free hum from the highway
a plea to necessary the ink an arm when it comes to winding
a place that wasn’t becoming or sitting outside on a lawn
and dressing up for it the dismissal seems
to some a feeding instinct so as to make attention
toward it
a brave sleep
when the fat far fight is over when the mercenaries
have come back we will stretch our hands up
into the white sky the door shifted slightly a light
throbbed in the throat of the train strawberries are a season
and depend on us I did it at a photo of redbud
stenographers do it in hoods in court yellow house
blue
house cottonwood sluff caping the sidewalk I hunch
in the shade of 4x4s cool and sweet we call things cool
and sweet slimpod shooting star is a desert flower
neon is a color of kayak I didn’t know how to apply
pray pressure the prime cut was not laughing
as people or creatures rub off on each other
heartbroke synthetic
there’s a line and we’re always over it but nothing kills you I don’t
want to think about prom or be chatty I would like the compulsive pets
to leave me alone the shallows that come when rinsing a cut
a child keeps calling oh delphinium yeah
her slapdash grown and repeating calling
a certain rare cloud like a rubber knuckle
the guy
in the tie-dyed shirt told me what Neptune meant
and why his position was either fucking with us or not I
harbor pessimism about his project the tea sips
you said something so sighed through all of us animals
last night and why a lizard ate me the lizard
is not a humanitarian
you ask is it as fragile
as that? I say something so soft add
greasy bangs all over the sheets I must have forgotten
the intelligent questions for the ultima thule ski rack
when I got asked out by the mail-order bride she
said something like a fire eater and then asked to display
her special effects
a sky bandaged with mustard blue
clouds a tooth measures sound tightly a generalist
says his prayers as the train whistles and public spaces
drown in something like irises deodorant-tinged dinner
jacket dust and a red ant mothers negotiate
with small sore thumbs let’s not flinch too much
when the yellow jacket’s wings brush our spines we all
lead our cults across the valley these are some dials for healing
birds and their ‘when-were-you-born?’s
