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How To Explain The Birds That Sing At 3 A.M.
by Daniel Hales
There’s a book in the next room that will tell their names, parse these notes, this sequence. On another shelf, none of this exists.
A sentry in a distant outpost listens, reports into his broken transmitter
“the clarity of their polyphony… the most precise measure of… that exists…
the fluidity of each arpeggio… the rate of a warble’s latency…
the depth at which a trill dissolves into its own reverb…”
* * *
They are conducting market research
Programming would not be possible without the underwriter’s support
Nature’s finest nesting adhesive
Worms sweet as hummingbird nectar
They have found their nest on Google Earth
They are calling everyone over to see
They are sending friend requests to you and me
* * *
I faintly hover, rehearsing the details of a favorite flying dream, trying to initiate myself into its secret society. It’s what I clothe my insomnia in.
* * *
A young robin asking questions
do mouses grow up to be rats
Parents mumble under their wings
He asks again
Daniel Hales has had poems, flash fictions, and creative nonfiction published in many print and online journals, including Verse Daily, The Massachusetts Review, Conduit, Quarter After Eight, Upstreet, Bateau, H_NGM_N, and previously in qarrtsiluni. He’s the songwriter, singer, and guitarist for Daniel hales, and the frost heaves.
Microphone
Afraid people aren’t listening?
Wear a crown made of condenser microphones.
Run your finger along your bevel square
while describing the miraculous slag sculptures
you’re smelting behind a wall of emerald arborvitaes.
Soon they’ll be staring at your macoma
(my word for the point where jawbones meet).
They may, in fact, stare at you like someone
who’s had their head sawed off and then sewn back on.
Comfort them: No need to be frightened,
when the stars flatline like that
it just means we’re traveling at light speed!
Then your lightsaber theory, how it’s the most benevolent weapon
because it instantly cauterizes each wound it creates, each limb it severs.
Speak till your throat fills with ashes and impractical,
unsustainable volts of joy begin to electrocute you.
by Daniel Hales
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qarrtsiluni 