by Liz Ahl

This month the crows are looking

to attract mates by drumming

their beaks against my mother’s house—

the metal chimney cap, the gutters,

or, if they’re really going for broke,

they’ll wield a beak-held stone

as one-half of their instrument,

and make the sexiest racket ever.

When I was a kid we had cherry trees

in the yard of a different house,

and my dad used them as an excuse

to purchase a professional slingshot,

by which I mean manufactured,

metal and hard plastic, not a thing

ad-hoc’ed by a kid with rubber bands

and the perfect forked stick lucked upon.

He paid for the manufactured version,

and little orbs of lead shot, and would,

from time to time, called by the ruckus

of the feasting crows march out to the yard

and sling that shot, one pellet after another,

into the murder. There’s no family memory

of him hitting a single crow. There were plenty

of cherries for eating, plenty uneaten.

I’ve watched crows chase a huge eagle

off a rocky beach. I’ve laughed as one crow

flew over the winding tree-lined road I drove,

above and just ahead of me, as if

it was driving, too, following each curve.

Crows are clever and supposed to bring us

signs or messages. They know

some kind of morse code they’re using

to knock and knock against the house

my crow-hassling father built, the house

where my mother lives alone now

among the crows, often choosing not to wear

her hearing aids, though even then

I’m pretty sure she must still hear

at least some shadow of the banging,

the tapping, their cackles and cries.

Liz Ahl is the author of the poetry collections A Case for Solace (2022) and Beating the Bounds (2017) as well as several chapbooks, including A Thirst That's Partly Mine. She is the winner of the 2008 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Prize. She lives in Holderness, New Hampshire.