Field Holler

by Sa Whitley

Behind bars in California,
Jon calls to tell me he is a member of the True
Owl family even though we still have the same last name.

I can imagine his call to flight.
How an alarm gets pulled in the heart of a strix
varia, and the air becomes the road. Do you believe me?

My beloved asks through the bars
around his nest. I ask him if he knows of anyone else
who has transformed into an animal altogether different than the one

they were assigned at birth.
And yet, I don’t believe those designations are the sole
arbiters of who we are and who we can be. He shakes his head No,

feathered cheek brushing up against
the phone in the jail’s community room. We grew up
on the Maryland side of the Anacostia watershed, and the watershed carries

a different connotation on its back
than the neighborhood of the same name in the District.
When we were young and in the suburbs, we thought, sure, we are all strigidae

and true. But the Barred Owl hunts
the Spotted, we were told, breaks windows. Local hunters began
preying on the barred but used fancy words for their violence such as culling and justice.

We were not quite Spotted,
but we lived among them. Jon hoots into the phone,
over and over, asks when he gets to come back home. I hang up without

answering and buy tickets for the Buffalo
Nichols concert. He’s a black man of the blues known for
bringing the field holler into the 21st century. First slaves, then convicts

would hoot or shriek
while swooping up cotton or tobacco in the fields
along the dorsal edge of Jim Crow roads. Maybe we learned

how to holler from the owls—
the sounds they make from their barred
and beveled bodies. A song we’ve needed to survive the days.

Sa Whitley is a an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. They are a black nonbinary poetry fellow with Cave Canem and the Arts Research Center (ARC) at UC Berkeley and the ASU Center for Imagination in the Borderlands. Whitley has published recent work in POETRY Magazine and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and they have received literary fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (2022) and the Community of Writers. They have also received invitations for fellowships with Tin House and Anaphora Arts. In 2023, they were a semi-finalist for the Sewanee Poetry Prize. Whitley received a Ph.D. in Gender Studies and an M.A. in African American Studies from UCLA and has held previous academic appointments with the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University and the Dartmouth Society of Fellows. In their spare time, they go to queer dance parties and watch sci-fi shows that imagine liberatory and postcolonial futures.

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