Spark Bird
Instantly, this inert thing jerked its head around, looked
at me wildly, then took off in a flash of gold. It was like resurrection.
— Roger Tory Peterson
Walking in, I heard your wicka wicka
chortle. Your pneumatic chisel blows
on campus power poles that bloom
the trial glasshouse walls
with frost’s mild fluorescence.
I failed to spot you. Now I can look close.
I roll your body, limp with fresh death,
onto my palm. Your beak’s radiant
thorn of black basalt blisters
on edge where the current
entered you. Is null now, coal’s dull clinker.
Your neck lolls off the meat of my thumb,
exposing the throat flushed rose as
cedar’s wounded core, bibbed by
a soot-black quarter moon.
Your breast glows like slubbed silk specked with russet
seed, as if the charge cracked the top off
your pod of milkweed down. The live
coal at your nape pulses bright
under my breathing.
I’m not the boy. My touch won’t wake you. Yet
you migrate softly up to my mind’s
vault of sky to join beauty’s
murmuration. Beauty, so
common, so infinite
in range. Winged spark, still you point me skyward.
*
Karen Holmberg is the author of three poetry collections: The Perseids, Axis Mundi, and Reckless Shelter (winner of the Editor’s Prize from Cider Press Review and forthcoming early autumn, 2026). In addition to poetry, she publishes lyric essays and art criticism, appearing in At Length, Tupelo Quarterly, and New England Review, among other places. Her first young adult novel, The Collagist, won the 2021 Acheven Prize and was published by Regal Press/Fitzroy Editions in the spring of 2024. She teaches British Literature, poetry writing, and letterpress printing at Oregon State University, where she is on the MFA in Creative Writing faculty and runs the Moreland Letterpress Studio.
