A view through coin-operated
binoculars, a squirming child
hoisted up onto a hip
Always the erasure of clouds
the pale birches blurred
into softening mountains
into an even softer sky
always, later, a sun
or moonrise
Always a river whispering
to streams, to streamlets—
to ascend as
a suspension of rain
Always a migration of hawks
riding a rising tide of air
as if called by
the child
with outstretched arms
with quarters in her fist
Barbara Westwood Diehl is founding and senior editor of The Baltimore Review. Her fiction and poetry have been published in a variety of journals, including Quiddity, Potomac Review (Best of the 50), Measure, Little Patuxent Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Gargoyle, Superstition Review, NANO Fiction, Per Contra, Thrush Poetry Journal, Atticus Review, The MacGuffin, The Shore, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Raleigh Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Fractured Lit, and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Also a poem in The TELEPHONE Project.