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Laban Carrick Hill is the author of more than 40 books for children, young adults and adults. His children’s picture book When the Beat Was Born: DJ Kool Herc (Roaring Brook 2014) recently won the 2016 Texas Bluebonnet Book Award. My children’s picture book Dave the Potter: Artist Poet Slave (Little, Brown 2010) earned a Caldecott Honor and a Coretta Scott King Award and was a New York Times bestseller. My cultural history Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance (Little Brown 2004) was a National Book Award Finalist, a New York Times bestseller and honored with more than 25 awards. Hill currently lives in Vermont where he teaches high school English and is working on a novel and a book of poems. Silencing Prettyboy Et Al. Songbirds never sing in fall, their voices mute after mating work is done. Plump and heavy, they wing their way, drunken bikers lurching from branch to branch to branch as autumn rushes through sugar and red maples, ash and dogwoods, and finally stubborn oaks, always the last to drop their leaves, curled and rotting like the fists of the dead. No more prettyboy, menotyou, queedle. No more trees uttering copious leaves. This is the time for turning inward, holding onto what you’ve got, and hunkering down in dense cedars with all you can gather so as not to die before the January thaw. Squirrel at the Feeder for Frank O’Hara Vladimir Putin invades the Ukraine! I am sitting at the window watching the red, red cardinal hog the feeder so drunk on seeds he couldn’t be bothered to crack them open, singing prettygirlprettygirlprettygirl, the frenzied squirrel below skitters the hard-pack like a Jesus Christ lizard sprinting across pond scum, Yanukovych believes menotyou menotyoumenotyou will stop them, the blue jay muscles the cardinal, the goldfinches clothed in winter flora camo anticipate in the dense cedar hedge until these super powers become bored or drain the feeder, below the squirrel claws at the siding to gain height, the blue jay goes queedlequeedlequeedlequeedle too large to actually feed from the trough but uninterested in relinquishing his perch, no sleight of wing even imagined, the carcass of Hugo Chavez rots somewhere in Venezuela, the squirrel finds his launch on the silver vent cap, slate colored juncos, purple finches, tufted tit- mice, Turchynov yells goawaygoa waygoawaygoaway, Ban Ki-moon gravelyconcerned, the goldfinches are greener and greener, the squirrel has it all figured out. Landscape #1: Bluff Your elbow juts about my ribcage boney flesh to cardigan you say I want to touch you crumpled paper anodized aluminum my body defies your ribbing my chest retards the onslaught just partially collapsed or so it seems I exhale my belt acts as ramparts for my buttocks I inhale my skin realigns itself you say we are only touching I feign soil erosion and sight the bluffs of Idaho the water table shrinking the dry unceasing summers against a backdrop of sky something must be done I cite my faulty ribs my heart’s escarpments
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