#NaPoWriMo - day eighteen

They came mostly from the rift lakes:
Malawi, Tanganyika, Victoria: Angels,
Compressiceps, Peacocks, Frontosa, Oscars.
 
In the afternoons, after Drama classes,
we’d get high and sit in the basement
watching them, feeding them, breeding.
 
O, the drama! Each fish establishing
its territory, invisible borders shifting;
colours flaring or dimming, depending.
 
They were so beautiful. And every day
after Drama class we’d get high
and sit in the basement watching them.
 
Encased by three walls of aquaria,
each requiring constant cleaning, monitoring,
exchanging water. Separating fish.
 
Each time I left the basement –
(and emerged sleepily into the light)
I’d wonder where the time went.
 
But it was time well spent,
that time with friends, getting high
on beauty, all that watching, all that drama. 

#NaPoWriMo - day seventeen

The passenger pigeon had the most spectacular demise, plummeting from a population of billions to a population of zero in less than 100 years. Passenger pigeons used to flock by the billions. The passenger pigeon was the most common bird in North America.  Passenger pigeons traversed the continent in enormous flocks that literally blocked out the sun and stretched for dozens (or even hundreds) of miles.

Nearly everyone in North America ate passenger pigeons. Passenger pigeons were a crucial source of food for inland colonists who might have starved to death otherwise.

Passenger pigeons were hunted with the aid of 'stool pigeons'. 

Passenger pigeons were shipped East in railroad cars by the ton.

Passenger pigeons were shot by the tens of millions. Passenger pigeon flocks and nesting grounds were so dense that even an incompetent hunter could kill dozens of birds with a single shotgun blast.

Passenger pigeons laid only one egg at a time in closely packed nests atop the dense forests of the northern United States and Canada. Passenger pigeon breeding grounds were referred to as "cities."

Passenger pigeons nourished their newborn hatchlings with crop milk, a cheese-like secretion that oozes out of the gullets of both parents.  Passenger pigeons fed their young with crop milk for three or four days. Passenger pigeons abandoned the hatchlings a week or so later, at which point the newborn birds had to figure out how to leave the nest and scavenge for their own food.

Deforestation deprived passenger pigeons of their accustomed nesting grounds, and when these birds ate the crops planted on cleared land, they were often mowed down by angry farmers.

People tried to save the passenger pigeon before it went extinct. People thought "the passenger pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific, having the vast forests of the North as its breeding grounds, traveling hundreds of miles in search of food, it is here today and elsewhere tomorrow, and no ordinary destruction can lessen them."

There was nothing anyone could do to save the passenger pigeon. The last reliable sighting of a wild passenger pigeon was in 1900, in Ohio. The last passenger pigeon in captivity – Martha – died on September 1, 1914.

It may be possible to resurrect the passenger pigeon.

No one has taken on this challenging task.

#NaPoWriMo - day sixteen

someone is always listening
it’s always raining somewhere
 
every meal we ever shared
ended with us in bed or in tears
 
you always warned me
my sins would find me out
 
i never thought they were sins
i only wanted a place to call home
 
which is always a cliché
and always the truth
 
i’ve forgotten
every conversation we ever had
 
or rather, i don’t remember
every word we exchanged
 
i wasn’t always listening
and always filled with longing

#NaPoWriMo - day fifteen

i’m tired of winter / winter wonderlands / the dead of winter / winter blues / the winter of our discontent / the thin ice / snowball effects / the pure and driven snow / breaking the ice / tips of icebergs / being out in the cold / winter solstice / nuclear / or otherwise

#NaPoWriMo - day fourteen

today i saw a ghost bird
the flock’s murmuration
a wedge in the air
shadows echoing
flight path and dance
 
i could not stop to mark its path
headed as i was in the other direction
 
i hoped to see it again upon my return
but the sky was empty
the fields covered with snow
it began to rain
and the birds waited in the trees
 
in the silence
ghosts are everywhere
nighttime or daylight