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’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Her sixth poetry collection, Nightshade, will be out in 2019 from Four Way Books; recent collections include Unfathoming and Furs Not Mine. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series and the Writers House at Merrimack College.

“Cherries” was first published in Orion Magazine in 2012.

Read more from Andrea Cohen in TLR: Chemistry, the all-poetry issue, available now.