By Peter Munro

Fifteenth grumbles one block east. In their courts,
wrens lilt war. They lack language for truces.
Dawn coffee sipped, my lips burn. Commuters cur-
tail silences, passages that seethe stresses.

I love what juncos traffic. I love the dance
genes dance. I love the word symphonic. Fluted
violence arrives. Finches pluck against.
Birches shift gears. I love love, rising, lauded.

Pavement hisses. Fifteenth stretches. Its wings
cover me. I speak in tongues of combustion.
Sparrows riot. Piston and cylinder ring.
All the morning musicks. Let cell division

leaf spring. Let chromosomes unkink. Let motets
tilt birds till war lilts. My ear lets Fifteenth Street.

~~~

Peter Munro is a former fisheries scientist who worked for forty-five years in the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, Sitka, and Seattle.  Munro has recently earned a poetry MFA at the University of Washington, Seattle.  Munro’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in such journals as Poetry, the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Iowa Review, Barrow Street, the Birmingham Poetry Review, Rattle, Fugue, the Painted Bride Quarterly, The Coachella Review, Poetry Northwest, and Epiphany.