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.