About the nest gone quiet under the roof.
The birds muzzled, eyes smeared shut
And an army of ants marching
Through their sockets, clasped like purses.
Muzzled birds, our eyes smeared shut.
As children, sometimes it felt like that.
Sockets clasped like purses,
Flying into the wired adult world.
It felt hopeless sometimes.
Even on Christmas morning
When wired, we'd fly to their adult world,
Eager to hatch our eggs, the ribbons and tinsel.
On Christmas morning,
They perched on the couch like two birds
And watched us hatch our ribbons and tinsel.
Mother fed us pie, father, seeds of grief.
Birds on a couch, a wire, they waited
To feel filled up
With more than pie and seeded grief.
We ate ourselves in silence.
Like birds muzzled, eyes filling up
The purses of our sockets
As armies of ants silently ate us
Under the roof of our nest gone quiet.
No One Told Me About the Death by Michelle Bitting | Poetry Reed Diffuser
$15.00Price
Michelle Bitting was recently named a City of L.A. Individual Master Artist Project grantee and is the author of seven poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles, winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in 2024 (C & R Press). She won the 2025 Banyan Review Poetry Prize. Her forthcoming collection Ruined Beauty will be published by Walton Well Press in Spring, 2026. Bitting is writing a novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.
