All you need to know to make sense of this poem
is that
in the previous century some parrots
were accidentally released into
the city from a ship from
a crate that was dropped I
assume and they flew out
over the harbor and made
a great bright circle
screaming and screaming probably
happy to be free but cold
so cold for they were from
Brazil and never worked a day
in their lives but here they had
to stay and they all turned green
eventually from breeding and
sometimes are seen standing
in the trees on our street
because
that will be most of the poem

&

Matthew Rohrer is the author of nine books of poems, most recently The Others, which won the 12th annual Believer Book Award. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at NYU.

“To Make Sense of This Poem” appears in TLR: Babel Fish