Incomplete Abecedarian of Censored Words
Each line opens with a word listed in the article, “These Words Are Disappearing in the
New Trump Administration,” The New York Times, March 7, 2025.
At risk of dissolving into feather and bone, the owl
belongs to night. I hear its soft question,
confirmation that it breathes. I try to
discriminate between call or cry, to understand its
expression, whether fear or fierceness erupts from its beak.
Female or male? Its song reaches beyond
gender, beyond pine or oak, stars or moon.
Historically, owls meant death and protection, witches and wisdom.
Indigenous communities also believed owls punished in-
justice, guarded fires, signified the soul released.
Key populations threaten / are threatened.
LGBTQ as penguins, barred as books,
marginalized to remnants of barns and woods. If
non-binary, then flight. If endangered, then silent as
oppression snatching up mice. Listen: tonight
pollution drowns the owl’s screech. Why not
race to a more tuneful end, roost inside the heart’s
systemic pulse? The owl can pinpoint
trauma’s signal skittering through leaves,
unconscious as survival. Talisman and repellent,
victim and predator, it stutters duets or screams like
women, wings spread, prepared to strike.
Carrie Green is the author of Studies of Familiar Birds: Poems (Able Muse Press, 2020). Her poems and visual poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, Salvation South, Still: The Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. She works as a librarian in a public library.
Read more poetry by Carrie Green appearing in Terrain.org: “More Questions of Travel, 2020,” a Letter to America poem, and four poems.
Read more Letters to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance and Democracy, published by Trinity University Press in collaboration with Terrain.org.
Header photo by Andrewfel, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Carrie Green by Ayna Lorenzo.
