Unrecorded

By: James Ducat

A bird chortles and as I turn on the camera

– who believes in bird-laugh –

a red-tailed hawk carves a hole above the trees

while the mobbing bird

dives at it again and useless.

The cackle is a threat the hawk

doesn’t find funny or frightening.

I was too stunned to hit record.

That was them, dive-bombing

after dinner in the room with ladderback

chairs and wine-colored carpet.

We get up but they stay,

we move and they

stay. Who is clearing dishes,

and do I even have a brother.

Don’t they know we can hear,

and the room is clean, somehow, even

the incomplete logic

of replaced placemats. Now the hiding,

their words scattering us like birds

above trees as they circle,

laughter-loud, uncaptured,

turn after turn, a violence

that cannot be bothered to leave.

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James Ducat’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Penn Review, Carve, Bellingham Review, CutBank, Apogee, Spoon River Poetry Review, has been featured on Verse Daily, and is anthologized by The Inflectionist Review, Orangelandia, and others. His chapbook A Field of Nopes is from Bamboo Dart Press.