When birds chirp at our feet
for bread crusts, the sounds are small prayers.
Look how they descend from the branch
to the ground, like a man kneeling
at the front of the pulpit.
How they wrestle worms
too big for their beaks, like a girl trying
on her Nonna’s rosary for the first time.
Every night, we offer our prayers
to the morning by the foot of the bed
to hear the birds sing another day.
There must be mornings where She
enjoys the bird song. And there must be days
where She drinks too many words
the night before, hung over on prayer.
See how She rolls over in bed
covers her ears with a flat pillow.
When we knock on the bedroom door,
does She pretend to be asleep?
Nicole Markert is a bi/queer poet. Their work has appeared in Moon City Review, Rust & Moth, Furrow, SWWIM Every Day, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, New Voices: Philadelphia’s Emerging Poets Anthology, and others. She currently resides in the Philadelphia area, and recently graduated with her MFA in Creative Writing from Rosemont College where she received the Graduate Studies Thesis of the Year Award for her first poetry manuscript, which she hopes to publish in the future.