Today’s Poem

Bird Dead on the Mississippi Shore in St. Louis

I set out for the meeting with champagne

meant to celebrate something that happened

when I hadn’t been looking. Celebrate not sinking.

Dust off the bottle. These things I say aloud.

Meeting friends, I pass the bottle to the girl

with ice, salad, and a bag to put all this.

People living and working in tugboats

pass, still living like Huck Finn except

for their very fancy phones. We gather

at rivers edge to sit on stones and drifted

tree trunks. We pretend to fish and the fish

don’t notice. A log shifts under the girl’s foot,

revealing a dead bird. The flies scatter and we

scram into the house on the hill.

We feed the mosquitos without noticing,

we’ve been uncorked. 

-Jason Braun