Everyone’s talking about the dead owls on Nextdoor 

Kathy in Tehama is beside herself she loved those owls 

through her nest-cam we watched the male approach daily 

to offer a limp thing to his mate who couldn’t move 

until the clutch appeared downy under agitated wing 

it’s possible mice burrow in floorboards mice in walls 

sample poisons mice in engines cooling it’s possible 

to cut the back of your hair without looking to shave

your legs on a floating dock if you roll with the swells 

when neighbors cut an 80-foot pine from our site line

it’s possible evicted birds will trouble the hole it was doctors 

who invented the chainsaw a marriage of teeth and wheel 

to speed removal of stuck babies trying to be born 

think of all the places we’ve traveled on the forward aim 

of a circle it’s possible trees reach nightly into the brains 

of children to shade them from our mistakes

—

Sara Michas-Martin is the author of Gray Matter, winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize and nominated for the Colorado Book Award. Other honors include support from the Vermont Studio Center, the Bread Loaf and Squaw Valley Writers’ conferences, a nonfiction grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and a Wallace Stegner fellowship. Recent poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, New England Review, Kenyon Review, KR Online, Los Angeles Review and Terrain.org. She lives east of Monterey Bay and is a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University.