Coming Up on Migration Season

I wonder if the same thing that tells a bird:
“Go, you cannot stay”, talks to my father’s wood pile.
If this is why we throw a plastic tarp
over the meticulously stacked mound every fall.

We trap our logs as though the wood wishes to leave.
As though the wood knows what ‘wishing’ is.

It’s migration season,
so we’re stacking our logs under the tarp,
the tarp that’s older than me.
It’s gross now and filled with holes,
but we don’t get a new one:
spending money is a disease and it’s spreading
onto tarps.

I wonder if it’s spreading
onto me, if I’ll make it through
another season of pulling out log splinters
by my teeth. If all the parts of me
will remember what it’s like to be warm in winter and
if the same voice that calls a bird home come springtime

will still call out to me.

Previously published by the Amsterdam Review and Centripetal.
Poetry and photography by HJH.