PROSE POETRY
CHRISTOPHER STEWART
GOD SENDS ME BIRDS
The afternoon her husband had his kidney removed, Mrs. K walked to Olive Park, where herring gulls made figure eights over Lake Michigan and a white-throated warbler stitched his tremolo from a sycamore near the water’s edge. It wasn’t just that day, she said, God sends me birds. Sparrows chattered in the window boxes at the apartment on Ridgeway Avenue. We were young, drinking scotch after a rainstorm before the scar on your left breast, the knife’s edge I traced with my finger as we lay in bed last night. From a parkway maple, a horned owl murmured. In a Prairie Belt backyard, a cardinal plumes in a pondlet as we count the seeds of a difficult year. As the cardinal preens and catbirds harmonize acapella blues from the weeping spruce by the gate it occurs to me that we still love each other, that if God sends birds, surely they gossip among themselves as they take in the folly of us, the dreary drudge of us, the joy on fire of us. Before they sing our histories into the arms of a red oak tree.
Christopher Stewart is the author of What Came After (The Calliope Group) and co-author (with Quraysh Ali Lansana) of The Walmart Republic (Mongrel Empire Press). His poems have recently appeared or will appear in Midwest Quarterly, RHINO, Bryant Literary Review, Connecticut River Review, Atlanta Review, and others. He is the recipient of the 2025 RHINO Poetry Founder’s Prize and was a 2023 finalist for the Iowa Review Award, among other recognitions.
