Winter

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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When my sisters can’t scrub the oil
from the sick gull’s feathers, they clip

its wings, untie the cord that binds
the slow sheet of its body

and plant it into a wooden box
drilled with tiny holes. It is my turn

to bring the diseased bird
to the breeder across the bank:

his medicine knives, his hut occupied
with feeders and soap. But because I am

youngest, because a hunter’s moon
is how I locate heaven, I take the gull

down the wharf, kneel in an untouched
tract of snow, and quiet its skull with rock.

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Carlie Hoffman is the author of When There Was Light (Four Way Books, 2023) and This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021), winner of the NCPA Gold Award in poetry and a finalist for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award. She is the translator of White Shadows: Anneliese Hager and the Camera-less Photograph (Atelier Éditions, 2023) and Selma Meerbaum Eisinger's Blütenlese (Hanging Loose Press, 2024). Her honors include a 92Y "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Prize, a Poet’s & Writers Amy Award, and the Loose Translation Prize, and her work has been published in POETRY, Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Jewish Currents, Columbia Journal, New England Review, and elsewhere.