Pamela Uschuk

elm thicket with your whistle, a secreted

mystery, above the ice crush of runoff

as swollen as the president’s big beautiful bill

cutting health care for amputees,

diabetics, stroke victims quarantined to wheel chairs

those kingly devotees cannot afford,

a bill giving him control

of all of us, he believes.

His freedom to do anything he decrees

can accomplish any crime.

Waxwing, your budget is berries,

mountain ash, orange pyrocantha fermented too early

by Climate Change

but that’s just fake news.

I admire

your sleek lemonaid belly caught by mountain wind

as fresh as linen sheets flapping their egret wings.

Bird flirt,

I swear your slick crest nods at all the girls, your

quick wink,

come hither black eyes,

charm with no fat wallet

or title demanding a birthday cake parade of tanks

cracking asphalt on capital streets.

Dear waxwing, each fawn dun feather

is its own parade in the blue spruce

turning duty’s acid as sweet as a lover’s bitten bottom lip, bliss

busting open the hardest blistered heart.

Waxwing, sing me through a forest of half-

truths and excuses on TV news

to goats mewling next door, absentee owner gone

when it cold rains.   I feed them wet meadow

grass, stroke their lonesome noses, read the history

of human neglect in the name of freedom

forgiven in their spirit eyes.

Neither goats nor you, waxwing, listen to verbal brawls break

the Whitest House, fists full of murder

against enemies who refuse to kiss a gold-plated crown trumpeting

deportations and erecting penal camps

for asylum seekers in America’s biggest swamp.

.

Beautiful cedar waxwing, teach us the necessity of your days

tumbling from remote roosts to whistle, to feed

the hungry and besieged, to pick through

the chaff of lies to find one seed of truth, to break

the curse of angry wings.

Night’s dark bell holds your sole caterwaul, lost

bobcat call before dawn rubs open her rheumy blue

lids or traffic snarl revs, guns rush hour

purposeless as random gunfire into a high school gym.

Quail you run for reals, stick legs almost ridiculous

alongside the pompous politico strut of white-winged doves,

you solo now

your mate incubates her unhatched brood

tucked with her soft cluck under teddy bear cholla

thorns away from coyote’s tender nose, screech

of his scimitar teeth.

My neighbor, a nurse from Obregon’s gone

silent as the waning gibbous moon,

her doe-eyed teen son and she sequestered

behind her rusty corrugated metal wall quiet now,\

her brother moved with his Bentley and gold neck chains, his cock crow

land deals, his midnight Fuck You Bitch, Puta screams

to his mate, Michelin tire spin of gravel

in neighbor faces.

Doubt he misses your sunrise plea, quail, or the way

sun rises twice over desert mountain stegosaurus spines

or his sister who glances often for ICE

over her shoulders in her blue Scooby-Doo scrubs

as she walks the hospital parking lot

to her paint-peeled Nissan sedan

after the ER night shift

tending the newly wounded, holding the hand

of a stranger’s last heart beats, after dumping

bed pans, adjusting pillows and IVs,

comforting, comforting, comforting

just as now you comfort me, quail,

walking, six topknot feathers trembling, beside

the braggadocio armada of white winged doves, before breaking

news rips through sky’s blue lace veil, before

the leader shakes his bleached blond crown,

lifts his stern red scowl, vows

he’s free to annex our neighbor north as his 51st state, puffs

Armani breast feathers, hops

atop the block with his crony white-winged doves,

to hog all the seed.

slams shut against our prayers for love

and peace, falls on the dirty sleeve hope

wipes across the kitchen counter.

Dark the heart

that betrays itself for greed, hips

grinding coins into satin sheets.

Dark the donkey who sings

at dawn, his grief penned isolate

in a desert wash coyotes run

carrying the empty satchels of their thirst.

Dark the silent limbs

of children amputated in another refugee camp

where their parents were guaranteed safe sleep.

Dark the silent limbs

of eucalyptus hanging as motionless

as mothers with no windows, no closet, no

kitchen, not even a tent to hide in

waiting for the next missile strike.

It never ends.

It never ends.

Towhee wakes to the east, whistles up sweet

mango light defining far desert peaks.

We are tied by rock and heat. Tied east

where daily bombs shatter streets

in a desert choking on phosphorous smoke, on dust, on splintered bone.

Where families like our families wake

to blood-smeared neighbors

buried under cinderblock rubble.

Do you hear the young man wail

in Arabic over the crushed corpse of his bride

cradling the corspe of his three day old daughter?

Endlessly he would scroll through his phone for photos

if his cell wasn’t blown to metal confetti.

Dark the eye of the cloudless Gaza sky split

by a year of drones buzzing revenge, dark

the flattened cratered cities, olive trees smashed

by the righteous fists of men

whose lies are scribbled in blood tithes

the same color as their own.