This selection, chosen by guest editor Livia Meneghin, is from Some Days the Bird by Heather Bourbeau and Anne Casey (Beltway Editions 2022).
The Letting
by Heather Bourbeau
People have become numbers, corridors are morgues
and we are mocked by the tenacious need of green to grow—
jade blossoms repel rain, my lemon tree’s grotesque fecundity,
my apple tree with patches of leaves, brown and golden, clinging
to branches that welcome the slow growth of lichen.
The soft rain a cleansing. Too trite a metaphor for this, this
broken dam of sorrow and relief pouring forth.
Some things cannot be forgiven. The cheapening of human life,
the persistence of oxalis, the failure to witness
when the lavender began to green.
I wake to a battle of squirrel and blue jay,
the leftover musk of skunk taunted by cat.
Above us, the conjunction is dissipating, but the wondrous
is not always this out of sight. This land, my fate
to be taught over and over again, I am not in control.
Heather Bourbeau’s award-winning poetry and fiction have appeared in The Irish Times, The Kenyon Review, Meridian, The Stockholm Review of Literature, among others. Her writings have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. A contributing writer to Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond with Don Cheadle and John Prendergast, she has worked with various UN agencies, including the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia and UNICEF Somalia. Her latest poetry collection, Monarch, examines overlooked histories from the US West (Cornerstone Press, 2023). 
Originally from Ireland and living in Australia, Anne Casey is the author of five poetry collections including one co-authored book. Her work is widely published internationally in The Irish Times, The London Magazine, Rattle, American Writers Review, Nimrod, Australian Poetry Anthology and The Canberra Times among others. Her recent awards include the American Writers Review Prize, Henry Lawson Prize for Poetry and American Association of Australasian Literary Studies Poetry Prize. She has a Ph.D. in archival poetry and poetics of resistance from the University of Technology Sydney where she teaches creative writing.
Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Honey in My Hair and is the Sundress Publications Reads Editor. She has earned a Writers’ Room of Boston Poetry Fellowship, Breakwater Review’s 2022 Peseroff Prize, an Academy of American Poets 2020 University Prize, and most recently Second Place in The Room Magazine’s 2023 Poetry Contest. After earning her MFA, she now teaches writing and literature at the collegiate level. She is a cancer survivor.
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