Loggerhead Shrike
2 Minutes Read Time
Associate Editor Kate Jayroe: Grauke’s quick, clever miCRo captures the lightning-in-a-bottle inspiration that can (sometimes) strike while inebriated as well as the oft-cloudy, mysterious aftermath. What did it mean last night? And what does it mean this morning? We’re left in a dark dazzlement as we pick up the puzzle pieces, thinking of the loggerhead shrike.
Listen to Kevin Grauke read the prose poem:
Loggerhead Shrike
I wake to a bedside note from last night’s self: “ . . . like a thorn to a shrike.” But what is like a bird notorious for its practice of impaling its prey on any sharpness handy, thus its nickname, the butcher-bird? Which makes me wonder: What did last night, and Bryan’s bitter Malört, do to so unmind me? And what is the inaudible tenor of that simile? My eyes track the sauntering ceiling. That bilious bottle wrapped in its jaundiced label brought back from the City of the Big-Shouldered Hog Butchers has yet to finish its bloodwork, I see. I picture the bird, its mask black as a hangman’s. They die, too. I close my eyes for darkness. A thorn awaits us all. Until then, wormwood. Gall.
