By Sherry Rind

New to this place, I hear a crash
and see my neighbor loading his recycle bin
hidden from the street. Face set to his work
he doesn’t see me at the kitchen sink

waiting for songbirds in the boundary trees.
Four months until leaves shelter
my yard; until then windows gape
straight through to my pantry’s tumbled bags

of flour and almonds. I snaked the almonds
from fence to deck. Days passed
before the crows first ventured down
from the wire where they argued against the sky;

and now those corbies see
who steps out and who stays shuttered in,
the garbage lids shut firmly, the scavenging sparse
but for a compost heap concealed behind a wall,
a trail of seeds, a closing door.

Copyright Rind 2018