Current
Issue
Volume 12.1
Bryan Price
—
A Holocaust of Birds
a photograph is a painting a taillight is a fisheye a
horse’s eye is a camera a pistol is a necktie a
nectarine is a pig’s brain a brain is a circumference
broken glass is a momentary memory lapse a backslash
is an elegy a guitar is fissile material an antelope is
the membrane between amnesia and parapsychology
a telephone is a glyph a radio is gnosis yellow is
magnetic and the sky is a long prefatory note which
precedes a book called A Holocaust of Birds
Sheep-herder
I watched you shoot a turkey once
it was 1987 and your mother just died
a sheep-herder watched us laid up on
the hood of a shit-brown Ford Bronco
someone kidnapped a wheelchair
placed it high up in the tall grass like a
cellophane windmill from a story about
those tiny rivers that connect everything
Bryan Price is the author of A Plea for Secular Gods: Elegies (What Books, 2023). His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Noon Annual, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Glacier, Dialogist, and elsewhere. He lives in San Diego, California.
