By Steve Myers

That’s where a peacock lived,
its otherworldly mewling,

so like that of a hungering child,
now ceased. An emptiness grieved

as deeply as the too-soon
vanishing of its hi-def blue.

Don’t you long for the ghostly
passenger pigeon’s return, or

the Appalachian panther,
the pine martens, Eastern elk?

So I do for my wandered brother,
whose three-days-old heart leaked

his life’s blood out, whose sudden
abdication had me watching

years after for a flash of blanket,
listening for that high wild cry

I once thought I caught as I swung
through this hairpin past the empty pen,

window down, blue sky flaring
like the crest of Krishna, full of eyes.

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Steve Myers has published a full-length collection, Memory’s Dog, and two chapbooks. A Pushcart Prize winner, he has published in places such as Callaloo, Kestrel, Open: A Journal of Arts and Letters, San Pedro River Review, The Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, and Valley Voices. He heads the poetry track for the MFA in Creative Writing at DeSales University.