I’ve never heard such a tune from a bird—oh, but this apple’s rot might take one down a ladder’s notch. All to the core you have me bitten, as if I’m the one to suffer from dysentery or rabies. Surely you take a mite-stricken cloth to wipe your face for as mottled a view the world you have. Wisdom stays aloft, branched out of reach, pecked at by the mis-seasoned finch singing through your fungus and blight, gloriously throating late summer’s sun as it pales and tells you goodbye.
Emily Rosko is the author of three poetry collections: Weather Inventions (U Akron P 2018); Prop Rockery, winner of the 2011 Akron Poetry Prize (U Akron P 2012); and Raw Goods Inventory, winner of the 2005 Iowa Poetry Prize (U Iowa P, 2006). She is the editor of A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (U Iowa P 2011). She is a past recipient of the Stegner and Ruth Lilly fellowships. Recent work has appeared in Bennington Review, Epoch, Gavialidae, New American Writing, and Third Coast. She teaches at the College of Charleston.
