#05 May 2000, 2000

Flap by Nathan Julian

A tribe of birds gather, drab, on my neighbor’s roof. Clawing shingled ledges, they squat single file on power lines, in the gut of a morning fog. Furtively, the fowls scatter like a winged cluster-bomb at the alert of a squirrel’s frantic scampering; making cats, framed in window prisons, mad with chattering angst and spasmodic