Quill & Parchment:

A Crow Means Everything
by Joannie Stangeland

A feather on wet pavement,
wings the tinge of midnight,
the rough cry rattling her morning.
In the back of a closet,
a black frock without pockets
on a faded silk hanger.
Who needs this dirge of a dress?
She will write people
who wear pink and walk
by blue water, who plant petunias
in the damp spring and read
magazines about Mongolia or Peru,
characters who speak a flock of languages
and open their hands to find
five days dribbled into the harbor
like pennies in a stone fountain
or stale bread scattered. She will
describe the falling twilight sky.
When the murder makes its own weather,
a wheeling dusk, that flurry
blocks what sun will show.
If there is one way to fly,
the crows will find the other.

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