By Lea Page

Featured art: “Jungle Gathering” by Fred Cremeans, Tiffany Grubb, and Wendy Minor Viny (Passion Works Studio)

No such thing
as an unseasonable storm
here on the high plains,
but winds were horrific,
temperatures plummeting.
A rescue call went out—
migrating waterfowl,
sheltering on a local pond,
were trapped in ice—
not literally frozen in place
but without enough open water,
they couldn’t take off.
People flocked to the rescue,
chopped open a path,
then leaned on their axes and mauls
to watch the birds go.
That shrinking window,
our collective responsibility,
but for this one moment,
let us be heroes.

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Lea Page’s poetry, nominated for Best of the Net, has appeared in Slipstream, Pithead Chapel, High Desert Journal, and Rust & Moth, among others. She is an assistant editor for creative nonfiction at Pithead Chapel and lives in rural Montana with her husband and a small circus of semi-domesticated animals.