Antiphony: Murmur of Crows

By Xavier Anthony Vazquez

After El Paso

at sunset/flocks will swirl/in pink and lavender/a divested music
of wings/a coiling dance amiss over head
an overcast chaos aflight, a dusk chorus lamenting/dark bodies collide/ frantic ellipses flicker
the sky, thin curtain between metaphysics and mythology crumpled/a road of witness
takes in the snarl and holy mess of molecular precision: teeth of feathers,
their movements harmonic as a head of hair/oblique assembly, a body as one
as air, shadowing wings a foreshadowing/& now pinions are known to hatch migrating winds

a fading whistle of reign/ a scheme, discordant scenes
unwound and foiled/an instant of burst ire close enough to the border
to stop shrapnel from softening heartbeats in the heat of its procreation,
it’s winter for the faction/watch them
retreat their meticulous design of taxidermal violence/watch them
retire their shaded partitions of plumage

nest embers won’t smoke tonight’s air/ won’t whiten
nest ash of foreign caw and sweat,
there will be no -cides tonight, no sides
tonight/no frantic law of flight

this congregating spring of strangers/won’t need paper
to nest in the solace of numbers/primacy will be foreign
to the foreign
a crow’s nest of fraying flag and scraps of white/remnants of a vacant shrine,
a diversity of beaks pitching resounding picks, pecks a mur

mur

an overcast chaos aflight, a dusk chorus rejoicing,
dark bodies make rounds,
a caucus unbound/gathers life mid-flight

a caw echoes off/the last of their rule, their ruses!
for the last time, the sky bruises

Xavier Anthony Vazquez is a writer & educator based in New York City. He graduated from St. John’s University studying government & international relations. In addition to those areas of thought, some themes that continue to inform his work are the nature of quantum consciousness, the relation of haunting & hallowed spaces, as well as the surreal & sublime. His work can be found in Raptor Editing’s The Great Good News of Your Own Voice among other spaces.