by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

photo credit: http://flowerinfo.org/bird-of-paradise-flowers

Long blue neck
tapers, flat orange wings
lifted, the way
bird wings rise
to their highest point,
vertical above
the center of the body,
just before the wings
lower and glide,
so that in this moment,
which for the bird
of paradise is
its forever,
the bird’s thin body
cuts through the air
with the least
resistance,
as though it flew along
some thin
and perfect path
of one thing
entering another.

Previously published in Talking Underwater, 2007, Wind Publications.

Sally Bliumis-Dunn teaches Modern Poetry at Manhattanville College and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Her poems appeared in New Ohio Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, PLUME, Poetry London, the NYT, PBS NewsHour, upstreet, The Writer’s Almanac, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a- day,  and Ted Kooser’s column, among others. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Two of her books, Talking Underwater and Second Skin, were published by Wind Publications in 2007 and 2010. Galapagos Poems was published by Kattywompus Press in 2016. Her third full-length collection, Echolocation, will be published by Plume editions in March of 2018.