Crow on Lincoln Street

Here no one watches the short, stout crow swagger
past pickups, past brittle trees, past brick houses

where crow-like men work on their yards. Not even
dogs bark from behind screen doors as he passes.

He keeps to the street, does not break into flight.
No cars brave speed bumps, slide past walls of work trucks,

scare or dare the crow who would sense them anyway.
But he avoids the park where box turtles bask,

pitbulls parade on leashes, boys play soccer,
red-winged blackbirds perch one moment on ghost-reeds

before breaking into song, then into flight.

*

Marianne Szlyk is a professor at Montgomery College. Her poems have appeared in of/with, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Setu, Verse-Virtual, Sequoyah Cherokee River Journal, Bourgeon, Muddy River Poetry Review, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, the Sligo Review, and Spectrum as well as the anthologies The Forgotten River and Resurrection of a Sunflower. Her books On the Other Side of the Window and Poetry en Plein Air are available from Amazon and Bookshop. She has also led workshops where poets write tributes to both survivors of COVID-19 and those whom we have lost.