Body as Bird Blind

Body as Bird Blind

         Finley Wildlife Refuge

Unrolled across the marsh’s stillness: the water fern’s floating
red carpet where a river otter turns and slows for a quick photo,
carving with its slick back a question mark in the surface murk.
I’m not sure how to keep this peace in me. What now, what now
my fidgety heart insists till I focus on those green beads scattered
across the red: bullfrogs, I finally realize, dozens of peeking heads.
An enzyme in just half their eye means they can see both worlds
at once. Mothers, too: who’s soaring, who’s sinking. Now what
am I, my kids both grown and flown? I stand back, admire them.
Try to stay out of their way. So that they’ll carry on without me.

Jennifer Richter’s newest collection, Dear Future, won the Tenth Gate Prize for midcareer poets and was released in May 2024 by Word Works Books. Natasha Trethewey chose Richter’s first collection, Threshold, as a winner in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry; her second collection, No Acute Distress, was a Crab Orchard Editor’s Selection; both were named Oregon Book Award Finalists. Richter teaches in Oregon State University’s MFA program.