By Joyce Schmid

Featured Art: “Garment Gold” by Mateo Galvano

for my husband

The little plumplings strut across the chaparral,
now fly off, fast and low.

I haven’t thought of quail for years—
not since the damp December
when your father died.

You’d grown up in that San Francisco house,
a child in the same twin bed he was to lie in
asking “Am I still alive? My heart still beats?”

Afterward, you had a can of quail eggs
as a birthday gift for me.

I pictured how you left the bedside,
woozy from the world of dying,
trudged down Noriega to the stores

and saw that jewel-green can
with Chinese characters and quail eggs on it,
luminous as South Seas pearls,

each egg a single cell—
instructions to create a life.

The covey lands again,
goes back to scratching in the weeds,
each small head nodding yes with every step.

You say you have no memory of quail eggs.
But you do remember leaving
in the middle of your father’s

dying to find
the perfect present.

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Joyce Schmid’s poems have appeared in Bridport Prize Anthology 2023, The Hudson Review, Literary Imagination, Poetry Daily, and other journals and anthologies. Her chapbook, Natural Science, is forthcoming from Glass Lyre press. She lives with her husband in Palo Alto, California.