Contagion

Contagion by n.m.rai
Read by Eric Ashford

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Contagion

Death from the sky drops in.
Don't shoot the robins the papers say.

It's the chickens and the ducks,
the fowl, that harbor the pathogen.

It's not the songbirds at the windows,
the ones that live in poems and dreams.

But crows die. Their large dark bodies are
hard to miss sifted onto sidewalks like snow.

We read the papers. We are under siege.
Danger may arrive with the dawn chorus.

Visions of flu and melting glaciers
join wolves in the living room

People share their nightmares
and fire wildly at clotheslines.