NVN Wednesday: Bodies — Non-Human — 2Poems
"Collective Nouns For Birds" by Katherine Page and "My Stepson in Tel Aviv Sends a Short Video" by Catherine Gonick
COLLECTIVE NOUNS FOR BIRDS
by Katherine Page
Workers at the Field Museum in Chicago inspecting birds that were killed when they flew into the windows of the McCormick Place Lakeside Center. Credit: Lauren Nassef/Chicago Field Museum, via Associated Press, via The New York Times, October 8, 2023
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There’s a circumference of concrete paths around earth’s freshwater body down which you ride your bike. Cold flutters sharp on pink knuckles, evening cicadas once a deafening scream, the size of a hummingbird with a tymbal spring now ghosts gripping tree bark shells. Some people have bells or shout on your left but you pedal gently around clumps of walking friends, air cupping October leaves as they twirl petals and click to the asphalt below. You can’t stop looking at the telephone wires, the gray space of sky between intersecting lines, the softest eruptions of birds blooming into flight, their punctuations of gravitational ease— comma comma question— a cote, a murder, a brood, a flock, a worm, a quarrel, a charm, a scold, a trembling. Nearly a thousand died last night, warblers, waterthrush, yellowthroats slamming warm, flapping bodies into the brightness of a shoreline Chicago glass. It’s impossible to see where one things starts and another one ends. Now even in a first floor apartment you can still imagine the pattering of rain on the roof. The maple hands are turning, neighborhood cats waul through the dark. In the morning, a dove coos in the evergreen outside your tiny window.
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Katherine Page is an elementary school teacher and writer living in Chicago. She is working on a manuscript about teaching and learning. She has poems published in Beyond Queer Words, Awakened Voices, Evocations Review, Green Linden Press, Open Minds Quarterly, Wingless Dreamer Press, Rough Cut Press, and Passengers Journal. She is a graduate of the 2022–23 Lighthouse Writers Workshop Poetry Collective in Denver, CO.
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MY STEPSON IN TEL AVIV SENDS A SHORT VIDEO
by Catherine Gonick
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At night, on a street near his house neighbors follow as soldiers carry a spent missile as if it were a body. The weapon that landed, killing only itself, is about the size of a man, maybe six feet long, one end twisted by impact. It takes three men to carry the gray corpse to wherever they are going. I don’t know how it is in Hebrew or Arabic, but in English, when we say a body, we know without being told whether the body is dead or alive.
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Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including Live Encounters, Notre Dame Review, Forge, Blue Heron Review,and Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and in anthologies including Support Ukraine, Grabbed, and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. She works in a company that slows the rate of global warming through projects that repair and restore the climate.