Rebecca Brock

On the Second Morning of a New Year

Last night, the dog followed me from room to room
like a little heartbreak until I took him out, past
the neighborhood, past the baby blackbird, perfect
and dead, still in the dirt like an omen,
next to the crooked telephone pole. The heron,
coming out of the fog, squawked a rebuke,
and then, those wayward geese calling directions
to each other—I mean I could only imagine: their crooked V,
the angle of landing, how they might be taking
toward the hill, across from the 7-11, where the cow is lonely
now that her mother has passed.
They are turning in for the night, I might have thought.
But I didn’t think that. Only the image
of the field, only the sense of their awkward,
goose belly landing, their ridiculous and useful feet—
their calls to each other sounding
like wrong turns and late nights—
like the kind of darkness
that makes you have to listen. 

________________________________________________________________________________________

Rebecca Brock’s awards include the 2025 Lascaux Poetry Prize, The Comstock Review's Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Poetry Contest, the Kelsay Book’s Woman’s Poetry Prize and the Editor's Choice Award at Sheila-Na-Gig. Her work appears in The Threepenny Review, CALYX, Mom Egg Review and elsewhere. A MacDowell Fellow, she is the author of The Way Land Breaks (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023). She is a reader for SWWIM. Find more at www.rebeccabrock.org.