When the Drunk Guy Sent an Injured Baby Goldfinch to the Wildlife Rehab by Uber

By Melissa Studdard

Happy National Poetry Month! We are honored to bring you poems from a special project, “Poetry in Bloom,” a collaboration with O, Miami Poetry Festival, poets Sandra Beasley and Neil de la Flor, and Dolly’s Florist. For all of April, these poems about flowers are being folded into origami and sent out with bouquets from Dolly’s. They also appear on O, Miami and on SWWIM in a variety of accessible ways, including audio, ALT text, and more.

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My kid DMd me two smileys laughing tears
and the note: This is something you would do,

and I don’t know if that meant the drunk part 

or the goldfinch alone in the backseat part
but I think it’s possible life may just be 

God telling a series of knock knock jokes 

so I run to answer the door
and a golden flower blooms in my chest

and I call it laughter

and I delight in how my kid takes time to message me
and a bouquet of silver flowers blooms in my chest

and I call it having a kid who DMs me

and another bouquet of flowers blooms in my chest
and I pluck them and hand them to a homeless man 

and they regrow 

and I pluck them and hand them to a robin’s nest
and they flutter down into the air around me

and I am a flutter among them

dancing on a picnic table at the park 
and I send a video of it to everyone I know

and my kid is the first to respond

and I am a thousand barrels of wine
pouring myself into the world

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Melissa Studdard is the author of the poetry collection, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast, and the chapbook, Like a Bird with a Thousand Wings. Her work has been featured by PBS, NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian, and more. Her awards include the Lucille Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America, The Penn Review Poetry Prize, and the Tom Howard Prize for Winning Writers. See www.melissastuddard.com.

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