Cherries

In the minute it took
to fetch the blue bowl

from the kitchen
to pick the just-ripe

cherries, the blackbirds
had come. They picked

the branches clean, ascending
into their own blue bowl.

Lacking wings, I
look for meaning.

We were all hungry.
We were all fed.

Andrea Cohen is the author of the poetry collections Everything (Four Way Books, 2021), Nightshade (Four Way Books, 2019), Unfathoming (Four Way Books, 2017), Furs Not Mine (Four Way Books, 2015), Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry, 2011), Long Division (Salmon Poetry, 2009), and The Cartographer’s Vacation (Owl Creek Press, 1999). Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Threepenny Review, Poetry magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, and elsewhere.

She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts.