This selection, chosen by guest editor Livia Meneghin, is from Some Days the Bird by Heather Bourbeau and Anne Casey (Beltway Editions 2022).
Our Prime Minister says the vaccine
is not a silver bullet
by Anne Casey
Primordial monstera fronds list
in the blistering shade, a solitary
kookaburra silent between
the flagging liquidambar
branches scratching at my
lofty perch—even the cicadas’
earlier vigorous castanet stilled
to a relentless dull trill—a scorching
waft occasionally riffling his breast
feathers, downy white
as snow coating the slopes outside
my father’s far-off window,
dusting his muddled head; icy sleet
piercing the winter
-pruned olearia where his cherished
blackbirds cluster on better days
and later here, the kookaburra will return
with his one true love and their
burgeoning brood to fill the swaying
evening branches
with their raucous laughter,
my heart rising to meet the updraughts,
torn between émigré anguish
and shimmering hope.
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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