by Christine Poreba

A tiny bird appears at the hole
of his house, as a waxing
crescent moon appears at its appointed hour.

We in the human house behind
have witnessed his parents prepare
for this arrival flying in, flying out.

And now this singular eye
as it first sees the dark become
green become sky

through the hole my son helped
his father carve. Today he wrote
his first set of recognizable words:

Mama Love. The letters sweep
in erratic flight across the page,
their lines intersect like leaves.

We heard his baby sounds at night
become vowels become letters sung
out of the order of their alphabet,

become questions made of words
strung together in a line like a trapeze.
This bird will begin to answer

the question tugging at its wing
when we are not watching the door,
a round opening with nothing to close.

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Christine Poreba is a New Yorker who lived for more than a decade in North Florida and now lives in Chicagoland. Her book, Rough Knowledge, won the Philip Levine Prize and her manuscript, This Eye is for Seeing Stars, won the 2023 Orison Poetry Prize and will be published in 2025. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies and numerous journals, including Barrow Street, The Southern Review, Cimarron Review, Puerto del Sol, and The Sun.

by Christine Poreba

The red cardinal behind

the fuchsia orchid pressed

against my window

pecks at the feeder and

his beak is as orange

and pointed as a cartoon bird’s

against the green in which

my glance takes in the reddish-stemmed

plant that marks the ashes of our dog.

The once white house down the block

is a memory covered

in just one coat:

the pink our new neighbor chose

is the shade of strawberry frosting,

the mane of a princess pony,

like the ones my son loves to color in,

though he wishes my black ink printer

could make its own rainbows.

The Shakers decreed that only

their meeting houses could

be painted white without

(of a blueish shade within).

As though the blankness

contained too much space for desire.

I covet the clean white house

two streets over, the way the bright

Satsumas pop from the leaves that hover

by the marigold doorway.

The owners often stand on a scaffold,

scraping clean another eave.

Once, we tended to our house this way,

once electric green with a hand-built

fence that wasn’t weather-worn

and a puppy that sprang inside its yard.

A house, like a body, has walls that are thin

against the griefs time brings it.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Christine Poreba’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Subtropics, The Southern Review, and The Sun Magazine, and various anthologies. Her book, Rough Knowledge, was awarded the Philip Levine Prize. A native New Yorker, she now lives in Tallahassee, Florida with her husband and son.