Hannah Levy

FALL ISSUE #14 POET

Hannah Levy is a writer and editor living in Berkeley, California. She’s the founder of The Rebis, a magazine that celebrates the connection between tarot and creativity. When she’s not reading or writing, she’s hiking in the redwoods, horseback riding, and playing extensive make-believe games with her daughter.

BIRDSONG

I met an eight-year-old boy who talks to birds.
It was early autumn in a year of yawning aloneness—
one hungry fever after the next. By then, I was stunned
and shortsighted, desire cracking my ribs. My body looping,
a serpent devouring its own tail. The boy emerged
from the redwoods like an apparition. I don’t remember
his face, but I can draw the way he held my young girl’s hand—
as if he were a father to every small thing that burned.
He told me about the birds and I imagined a scant whistle, a hum
for play. Nothing like the prayer he whispered. When a sister dies,
you don’t accept apologies. You stamp ink-stained fingers
into every brittle breath, into every plant that moves
toward the sun. Smudge dirt into every corner. Run
into the cold river bellowing, slice your toes on the rocks
and laugh the blood away. My sister didn’t die,
but she locked herself out and I mourned her all the same.
In the slanted light, the trees transpire against all odds—
a single redwood exhales five hundred gallons of water a day.
The boy walked through that forest of tears and called it fog.
Sang to the Steller’s Jay and learned his secret flight.
It had been a long time since I’d spoken to a stranger
without a mask—longer still since I had such an intimate
exchange with a child that wasn’t mine. I saw the gentle
angle of his head as my daughter spoke her lilting stutter.
Later, I tilted one ear to the sky. Listened for birdsong
all afternoon, but the world had gone silent.