Squcks the commonest
of critters one
could find in
any given park
rustled in
the waist level
fronds of
a supineapple
plant and
gave fright to
a group of
dodos who
having been
engineered to
exceed the
evolutionarily
limited capacities
of their flightless
ancestors scattered
into the air
and into other
trees and shrubbery
making a sound
like a hundred
brooms weeping
Alex Starr is a writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Alex’s poems appear in Vallum, Three Rooms Press: Maintenant, Lunch Ticket, Ignatian Literary Magazine, La Piccioletta Barca, Atlas & Alice, Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, Drunk Monkeys, Snapdragon Journal, The Literary Bohemian, Zoetic Press, The Write Launch, and Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, and will be published in Appalachian Review, Jelly Bucket, and Midway Journal. Prior recognitions include the Dorothy Sugarman Prize in Poetry, George Harmon Coxe Award in Fiction, and Barnes Shakespeare Essay Prize from Cornell University. Alex holds a B.A. in Philosophy / English from Cornell and Oxford where he co-led the Mansfield College Poetry Society.