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Maya Polan

Birth Order

This morning the chickens mew like cats
and you are in our home

state, far away, your own cat clucking
in the crook of dawn.

Here, in the place I ran,
is the place I left.

An old house, amid repair, naked of glass,
its heaps of pine glowing

like a red barn in a thunderstorm.
Beams stained with slick dark rain

latticed with powder, feathers—
the crows taking up the cry

so the chickens know to quiet.
It was these obediences

that made me call.
I am describing a new unwreckage

but I hear our neighborhood
coop, domesticates, lilacs

rippling in the wires. Same yard I snuck through
where you hunkered down.

Maya Polan has lived in Connecticut, California, Indonesia, Oregon, and Texas, graduating with a BA and an MFA en route. Her writing recently appeared in Grist, New Haven Review, and Cloudbank.




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