Sarah Barber

BIRDS AREN’T REAL

Before I got woke I was just like you
and collared my cats—even the well-fed
hunt—with bells and bright-colored ruffs.
But birds see all right. They can see

the stars. They’ve got camera eyes.
They’ve got speaker-throats programmed
with an endless loop of squawk and coo.
They’ve got recording microphones

and, inside, where the heart would go,
a battery that recharges when toes
coil over powerlines. It’s been like this
awhile. The old ones in museums

are stuffed with too much arsenic
to touch, and the CDC says dead ones
are diseased. Fake, fake, fake.
I saw one malfunction once. It was

dipping its head in the water, sure,
but all jerky. It almost looked like a duck
you could stuff with sage and onion.
But I wasn’t fooled. Don’t you see how,

when they fly, they subdue the air?
I’d like to take one by its throat—
the cheap small type—and why sing,
I’ll say, since nobody hears?—and wring.

SARAH BARBER is the author of Country House, winner of the 2017 Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry, and The Kissing Party (National Poetry Review Press). Her poems appear widely. She teaches at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York.