Bird Watching

By Brett Warren

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He watches his wife push open the door 
of the campground bathroom, take a step in, 
check to make sure someone isn’t hiding 
in the single stall. The maneuver takes all 

of three seconds, but the hesitation is at odds 
with her vigor on the trail. When he asks, 
she says she hardly thinks of it—most women 
do some variation of the same thing, or at least 

it crosses their minds, to be ready. Decades 
married, he’s only just noticing this vigilance—
unspoken, subterranean, intuitive. The door 
swings shut with a thud, startling a barn swallow 

who nests above it every spring. The bird 
swoops out from under the overhang, up again 
to perch on a branch until it’s safe to return. 
How many times a day does she do this? 

He remembers another bird he saw once, 
nesting on a restaurant’s outdoor fire alarm—
the curve of her taupe feathers, dry thatch 
of twigs a surprise, so jarring atop the flame-

red box. He wonders what it is with these birds, 
why they don’t find somewhere safer. 

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Brett Warren (she/her) is the author of The Map of Unseen Things (Pine Row Press, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in Halfway Down the Stairs, Harbor Review, ONE ART, Rise Up Review, and elsewhere. A triple poetry nominee for Best of the Net 2024, she lives in a house surrounded by pitch pine and black oak trees—nighttime roosts of wild turkeys, who sometimes use the roof of her writing attic as a runway. See brettwarrenpoetry.com.

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