Blue Feathers

I dream the birds nesting outside the house
fly to the hospital to see me, blue feathers
falling to my chest. I am never alone

and yet the birds call as if they mean
to speak to only me, and not to her.
They perch by my ear and whisper

We can save her, but we won’t.

Kerri French’s poetry has appeared in Barrow Street, Mid-American Review, storySouth, DIAGRAM, Waccamaw, Lumina, PANK, Best New Poets, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, among others. Instruments of Summer, her chapbook of poems about Amy Winehouse, is available from Dancing Girl Press. She lives and writes outside of Nashville, Tennessee.