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Bee Bee Bee Green Rosella Eastern Quoll Eastern Quoll Eastern Quoll Green Rosella Koala Bee Turtle swan

Clade Song 16
 

Midnight, Fresh Air

After an absence the screech      owls are in residence again

trilling against winter     ping-ponging up and down the block.     I slip my head out      

the sliding glass door and breathe     wheezy     coughing lightly to the owls    

hello, hello     a human exhalation somewhat     uncontrolled

a death rattle under other circumstances       or in another time. This time

I have no beak.      I take in the darkness like a mouse

going down a gullet    inhaling the neighborhood as I do each day     only slow:

the white mountain over the simple houses    the dipping electrical wires

and smoke from chimneys.      I exhale into the cold    imagine Covid sweeping

sweeping across the sage and the lavender       the garbage bins and Webers.  

We are all infected        behind our doors, aren’t we.    

From my nose a drop falls      like melting snow.    How many viruses

on this paper alone?      And then suddenly the squealing    

brakes of a man in his hoodie     as he wobbles down Spring Street on a bike

 

  
Goanna snow skink Goanna darter slug coyote

Nick Neely is the author of the essay collection Coast Range, a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing, and the travelogue Alta California, an LA Times Bestseller that details his twelve-week trek from San Diego to San Francisco to retrace the first overland Spanish expedition through that territory. He is a recipient of PEN Northwest’s Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, a UC Berkeley–11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship, and an AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award. His work is published in magazines such as Orion, Mother Jones, Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Harvard Review, Fourth Genre, FIELD, Ninth Letter, Ecotone, and River Teeth. He teaches at Eastern Oregon University and directs its low-res MFA program in creative writing with a special concentration in Landscape, Ecology, and Community.