By Ahrend Torrey
Everything is here now. Then in an instant, it’s changed.
You know the old saying: you can’t step in the same river twice.
Well, I can’t see the same thing twice.
In a split moment the branch of the sycamore sheds its leaves. Therefore,
what I see is for this moment, only, never to exist the same again.
Right now, three birds perch on the eves of the old house.
The eves that’ve mildewed more green since we moved in.
I say birds because I don’t really know what they are. Soon, they’ll be all changed.
With one beat down, their gray wings open
—Now they’re gone!
Ahrend Torrey enjoys exploring nature in southern Louisiana where he lives with his husband, Jonathan, their two rat terriers Dichter and Dova, and Purl their cat. He is the author of Bird City, American Eye published by Pinyon Publishing (Montrose, CO) in 2022, and Small Blue Harbor published by the Poetry Box Select imprint (Portland, OR) in 2019. His work has appeared in storySouth, The Greensboro Review, and The Perch (a journal of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health, a program of the Yale School of Medicine), among others. He earned his MA and MFA in creative writing from Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and is a recipient of the Etruscan Prize awarded by Etruscan Press.
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