Jonathan Greenhause

EVICTION

We owe our lives to cosmically-slight odds,
to pinpoint precision between a decades-old egg


& just-minted sperm: A single second off
& we’re nothing. A streetsweeper’s rolling pin


wipes away flaccid condoms, mold-spotted
trails of breadcrumbs, the hum of an injured bee,


as a red-tailed hawk, regal & statuesque
upon a corner rooftop, is repeatedly assailed


as if magnetized, by this mockingbird, eggs it on
with its presence. I wince at the bully sun,


calculate how long before light
will nest with darkness. This city street’s


a swiss cheese of potholes, a collage
of soda bottles & dime bags, of ashes divorced


from cigarettes’ filters, a fluttering of wings
painting errant shadows on cornices,


this mockingbird a prizefighter’s swift silhouette
backlit by our star growing cold.


Paint peels off the benches like bible pages,
where poor souls wear their crosses


of unemployment: Listen to what they mutter,
with which of those 2 birds they identify.

Jonathan Greenhause has won the Aesthetica Magazine Creative Writing Award in Poetry, the Ledbury Poetry Competition, the Prism Review Poetry Prize (twice), and the Telluride Institute's Fischer Poetry Prize, among others, and his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Fourteen Hills, Moon City Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Poetry Society website.  He lives with his wife and two sons across the river from New York Quarterly.

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