Crow Song

You remember frost-glow mornings,
when Earth sparkled, diamond-encrusted.
Your mother would drive you to school
in a sleepy haze, the car a warm pod against
the cool wake-up air. You look through the car
window; the farmer down the street lined
his driveway with the corpses of black birds,
shot dead. The sunlight glancing across their feathers:
you could find gold at the end of their rainbow.
You cawed for them.

Twilight-dusted evenings found you lying in upturned
dirt on the bulldozed foundation where your dad planned
to build a new home. Your fists clenched around loose
seeds you scooped from your mother’s feeders—meals
meant for finches and cardinals; the “friendly” birds.
Cross-legged and statued, you sit, palms open and sweating,
offering. Trained to welcome a flutter, now you welcome a
murder. They come, bills selecting individual millets like tweezers.
They feast in your stillness until a passing truck disrupts,
sends them up like feathered fireworks into the day’s last
rays. You cawed for them.          

The farmer’s garden was scavenged. Pecked tomatoes winked
at him, browning edges of torn flesh. He massacred
the murder, then took string and noosed it around the neck
of a not-quite-dead. You witness: the way the bird flapped,
weak-winged against him, rattled in its rough alto.
He let it hang for weeks, strung up in his maple tree,
a warning. You cawed for them.

Years later, after the farmer has passed, they followed you to college.
Staring out the library window, you see them gather:
black spots on a green lawn. They dazzle in the daylight, and your muscles
contract. You run, you must protect—disperse them before they are murdered,
by a farmer or each other. You burst into the yard and they erupt
charcoal to the sky. They caw for you.

Sam Campbell is a writer and teacher from Tennessee. She earned her English M.A. from East Tennessee State University, where she was the Editor-in-Chief of The Mockingbird. She currently serves Arkansas International as Assistant Managing Editor, and she is the fiction editor and co-founder of Black Moon Magazine. She publishes across all genres; her work appears or is forthcoming in October Hill, MORIA, Tennessee's Emerging Poets Anthology, and E.ratio Postmodern Poetry, among others. Her awards include, but are not limited to, the 2019 Jesse Stuart Prize for Young Adult Writing and the 2021 James Still Prize for Short Fiction. She is currently a second-year fiction MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas.