Trust

Are you certain they're crows, he asks,
as the dark birds wheel and swarm the arboretum's edge.
He wants them, as I did, to be something else,
less expected. But he is a newcomer
to the marshes and trees I pass each day
and I know the thickets of wings that rise toward dusk
when the moon hangs in the east like an ancient coin
pressed into my palm.

Joannie lives in Seattle, less than a mile from where she was born. Her chapbook, A Steady Longing for Flight, won the 1995 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award.