By Amanda Roth
Over a bonfire and whiskey,
we tried to talk about our years
apart; the peculiar
color of individual dark.
Out of the night, a barred owl caught
our eye - white
feathers silent and slicing
through the conversations we
could not muster.
What did we expect? We never saw
the owl's eyes and afterward, when you paced
the yard, there were no feathers.
The fire went out and the dark
continued its work
of carving holes
in our faces.
Amanda Roth (she/her) is a poet whose work explores motherhood, embodiment, and the climate crisis. She is the author of the full-length collection, A Mother’s Hunger (2021) and is featured/forthcoming in Rappahannock Review, Marathon Literary Review, MAYDAY, Moist Journal, Blood Moon Poetry Press, and elsewhere. She can be found on Twitter and Instagram.