About the Feature
The Crows
Photo by David Trinks
I left out a bowl of rice dressed
in violets and honey, unsure
if it was offering or temptation.
A crow appeared
on my kitchen counter
and ate it all.
The next morning the crow
returned with its flock,
shades draping the shagbark,
all of them chanting
their own names:
Crown me, called one.
Sunder, another.
Hearing its name among
those fleeing their beaks,
my heart abandoned its nest.
About the Author
Amie Whittemore is the author of the poetry collections Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press) and Star-Tent: A Triptych (forthcoming from Tolsun Books, 2023), the 2020–21 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in the Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the reviews editor for Southern Indiana Review and teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University.