It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
When my sisters can’t scrub the oil from the sick gull’s feathers, they clip its wings, untie the cord that binds the slow sheet of its body and plant it into a wooden box drilled with tiny holes. It is my turn to bring the diseased bird to the breeder across the bank: his medicine knives, his hut occupied with feeders and soap. But because I am youngest, because a hunter’s moon is how I locate heaven, I take the gull down the wharf, kneel in an untouched tract of snow, and quiet its skull with rock.
Carlie Hoffman is the author of When There Was Light (Four Way Books, 2023) and This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021), winner of the NCPA Gold Award in poetry and a finalist for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award. She is the translator of White Shadows: Anneliese Hager and the Camera-less Photograph (Atelier Éditions, 2023) and Selma Meerbaum Eisinger's Blütenlese (Hanging Loose Press, 2024). Her honors include a 92Y "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Prize, a Poet’s & Writers Amy Award, and the Loose Translation Prize, and her work has been published in POETRY, Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Jewish Currents, Columbia Journal, New England Review, and elsewhere.
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This poem startled and compelled me from the title to the last vivid image, so meticulously aligned. Wow.