The kind of animal who comes in from the woods to a town with only two telephones and presses the mass of his enormous body against the glass face of the telephone exchange, where someone working late, or expecting a call, might see it on hind legs fill the window like a shortness of breath, brief interruption of fur from scars running across its chest-- then retreat into the
enormous night. It is this kind of animal I once spoke to, unarmed, approaching a rock ledge where the stone parted and was filled by air—then the air parted, and what remained there was only the fearful unknown, which we both smelled on the wind.
117 The Paris-American
Miriam Bird Greenberg's work has appeared in Poetry, Ninth Letter, and the Colorado Review. She's the author of two chapbooks, All night in the new country (Sixteen Rivers) and Pact-Blood, Fever Grass (Ricochet Editions), and has held fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the NEA, and the Poetry Foundation. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and teaches ESL.