Northern Flicker                                                                          —Michael Hardin


A flicker is a woodpecker
that scours the ground
searching for insects
with a two-inch tongue.

A group of flickers
is a menorah, a candlestick,
from the same root as minaret.
Red flames adorn their napes.

I worry about our farmhouse, 
slat walls and oak floors,
oil furnace in the basement.

With two kids and three dogs,
we don’t have enough exits;
my faith is in the fire alarms.


Turkey Vulture           


A wake of vultures circles
on thermals above Danville.
Something is dead, waiting
to be scavenged, reborn

into the food chain.  My body
is not yet ripe enough
for the volt with featherless heads
to consume my flesh and organs.

I imagine being dead, a corpse
undecided: incinerate or donate?
Nature cleans its bones—

birds, insects, and bacteria.
How will my children assimilate me:
a sonnet or ashes on the tongue?

Michael Hardin

Originally from Los Angeles, Michael Hardin lives in rural Pennsylvania with his wife, two children, and two Pekingeses. He is the author of a poetry chapbook, Born Again (Moonstone Press 2019), and has had poems published in Seneca Review, Connecticut Review, North American Review, Quarterly West, Gargoyle, Texas Review, Tampa Review, among others. He has recently finished his memoir, Touched.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2019