COLLECTIVE NOUNS FOR BIRDS

by Katherine Page

Workers at the Field Museum in Chicago inspecting birds that were killed when they flew into the windows of the McCormick Place Lakeside Center. Credit: Lauren Nassef/Chicago Field Museum, via Associated Press, via The New York Times, October 8, 2023

There’s a circumference of concrete paths 

around earth’s freshwater body

down which you ride your bike.

Cold flutters sharp on pink knuckles,

evening cicadas once a deafening scream,

the size of a hummingbird with a tymbal spring

now ghosts gripping tree bark shells.

Some people have bells or shout

on your left but you pedal gently

around clumps of walking friends,

air cupping October leaves as they twirl

petals and click to the asphalt below. 

You can’t stop looking at the telephone wires,

the gray space of sky between intersecting lines,

the softest eruptions of birds blooming into flight,

their punctuations of gravitational ease—

comma comma question—

a cote, a murder, a brood, 

a flock, a worm, a quarrel, 

a charm, a scold,

a trembling. 

Nearly a thousand died last night,

warblers, waterthrush, yellowthroats

slamming warm, flapping bodies into the brightness 

of a shoreline Chicago glass. 

It’s impossible to see where one things starts

and another one ends.

Now even in a first floor apartment

you can still imagine the pattering

of rain on the roof. The maple hands are turning,

neighborhood cats waul through the dark.

In the morning, 

a dove coos in the evergreen 

outside your tiny window.

Katherine Page is an elementary school teacher and writer living in Chicago. She is working on a manuscript about teaching and learning. She has poems published in Beyond Queer Words, Awakened Voices, Evocations Review, Green Linden Press, Open Minds Quarterly, Wingless Dreamer Press, Rough Cut Press, and Passengers Journal. She is a graduate of the 2022–23 Lighthouse Writers Workshop Poetry Collective in Denver, CO.

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