Chimney Swallows

The Chimney Swallows are part of our family.
They migrated in June

and we thought they were bats.
Their caws woke me before 6 am.

Rooster-screeches were their
melancholy,
like song blues 
and I cried to Billie Holiday

Remembering I’m over my first love.

Just like my best friend
the birds listened.
uncensored.

Like the spreading of Queen Anne’s Lace
in dank,
Iowan soil.

We dress up
mason jars with
floating peonies,
like floating bodies,
the floret of death.

Pale petals
like grey hairs,
cleared,
plucked
when sun comes.

Petal of ruin,
petals of home.
When I feel the swallow’s loneliness,

when I hear the bird’s murmur just like me.

Feathered bark,
chirp,
nestling flight
in chimneys

in the thick stick of August.

Rachel Lansky is an Iowa-based poet and writer whose work draws from nostalgia, memory, nature, love, loss, insects, birds, soil, farmland and the quiet understated beauty of Southeast Iowa, where her and her twin sister grew up.