I saw a barn owl staring out from a telephone wire
driving down the road with the sky looking
like the edges of the newspaper we crumpled
into balls to light the woodstove
in the house I learned hunger in
through the fields made heavy with sky
the damp clinging to my skin
the way a washcloth stays cloaked to the rind
It’s January, and in my environmental health science class
this afternoon we talked about Rachel Carson and Silent Spring
And with the EDM pumping through my brand-new noise-canceling headphones
I can’t hear the sounds of the world outside my windows
And the ground looks the way I remember April
when I didn’t have words to put to it
Gray Davidson Carroll is a writer, public health educator, and (self-proclaimed) hot chocolate connoisseur. They are the author of the poetry chapbook Waterfall of Thanks, and their work has further appeared or is forthcoming in Sage Publications, Frontiers in Medicine, and elsewhere.
