Crow flies through smoke and coughs

So hard he makes a mountain
Of silence and crawls inside
Tastes the singed dust
Raw in his throat like an early morning
Every breath an incantation
Against the loneliness of being
And outside the face of rain imagines itself
Into a long-awaited bus stop
It missed on purpose, the kind
The faithful return to when tongues
Become song—and hidden
In those lonely consonants
There is another story of a mountain
Flying low to avoid the smoke
Who became in the blink of an eye
A bird

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Peter Grandbois is the author of fourteen books, the most recent of which is Domestic Bestiary. His plays have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor at Boulevard and teaches at Denison University in Ohio. You can find him at petergrandbois.com.