The Sunday Poet: David P. Miller

David P. Miller

David P. Miller’s chapbook, The Afterimages, was published in 2014 by Červená Barva Press. His poems have appeared in Meat for Tea, Main Street Rag, Ibbetson Street, Painters and Poets, Fox Chase Review, Third Wednesday, Wilderness House Literary Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Oddball Magazine, Incessant Pipe, Clementine Unbound, and Ekphrastic Review, among others. Anthology appearances include Tell-Tale Inklings #1 and three Bagel Bards Anthologies. His poem “Kneeling Woman and Dog” was included in the 2015 edition of Best Indie Lit New England. David was a member of the multidisciplinary Mobius Artists Group of Boston for 25 years, and is a librarian at Curry College in Milton, Mass.

Conservation of Mass, in Four

Two immature birds, failed.

One at rest on the curb;

its brother toppled in the gutter.

One with a grackle’s speckled

back. The second’s plump

rust-red feather belly.

Flies make electron orbits

eccentric around rotting

nuclei. Eyes like dead cartoons.

Forty steps to the third corpse.

This one a scentless, had-been-

avian delta, flat

as the pavement

and colored the same.

Savorless wing feathers,

spurned by maggots,

creased like an origami,

beak remnant at the apex.

Everything devourable,

devoured.

Ten steps next to a sparrow

hopping from sidewalk

to pocket park.

Claimed down feather

cinched in its beak,

a treasure to cozy the nest.