The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Studies of Familiar Birds by Carrie Green

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Fever

The quilt Virginia huddles beneath
is too blue—Delft blue, not sky.
It is not her quilt, but it is her quilt.

That window opens too wide—
she’s shivering; someone shut it, please.
It is not her window, but it is her window.

And the girl leaning over her—
a slender curving beak
interrupts her face,

and chestnut down blooms
like moss over her skin—
she is and isn’t Genevieve.

Don’t move, Virginia, don’t
startle her. Feel the kiss
of her bill against your cheek.

The feathers trimming her skirt
silence its rustle. She cannot speak,
Virginia, but maybe she will sing.

This selection comes from Studies of Familiar Birds, available from Able Muse Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Carrie Green’s book, Studies of Familiar Birds, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press in December 2020. She earned her MFA at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Northwest, River Styx, Flyway, Blackbird, Cave Wall, DIAGRAM, and many other journals. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky, and works as a reference librarian in a public library. Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about gender and diversity issues. She’s also the Managing Editor of The Wardrobe and the Non-Fiction Editor of Doubleback Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens Literary Journal, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Selkie Literary Magazine, and Writing Class Radio. She’s currently an MFA Nonfiction candidate at Vermont College of Fine Art and lives in Riverview, Florida.