A bird is a kind
of island. In flight,
a flock is called
an archipelago.
At rest, a peninsula.
When two flocks
meet, they are called
a communion.
Used in a sentence:
Two flocks
met and became
a communion.
A surgeon opens
a body with a scalpel.
A scalpel is a kind
of bird: small,
thin, flightless.
A flock of scalpels
is called a bouquet.
Children are a kind
of book. We take them
from the library
and put them back.
A flock of children
is called a collection.
A body is a body
until it falls into ruin.
Then the body
is a kind of nothing.
A nothing is a kind
of bird: rare, sweet
voiced, carnivorous.
It eats the eggs
of other birds.
It’s the island I go to
when I fall into ruin.
Ryan Teitman is the author of the poetry collection Litany for the City (BOA Editions 2012), selected by Jane Hirshfield for the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, The Southern Review, and other journals. He was formerly a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and is currently the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College.
