By Selena Spier
Featured Art: “Oblivion” by Nasta Martyn

        for Elizabeth Moylan

I wonder what will become of all this beauty
when we’re gone? Women’s hips that sway and open
as they walk, tulips at the edge of their season.
I live between a hardware store and a florist.
Down the street is a hospital for wild birds.
Every morning on my way to work, I see
somebody standing at the door with a cardboard
box in their arms full of paper towels or newsprint
and some sodden clot of feathers, usually a pigeon
or a dove, with a mangled leg or a broken
wing, and the box will shudder
sometimes in their arms and they’ll peer in
with a look of concern and there’s a moment
I forget that one of us will die first.

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Selena Spier lives in New York City, where she works at the nonprofit Brooklyn Poets and co-curates the KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Series. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere.