Every day something green
snaps by, in front, behind. Again.
A hummingbird mother,
her nest cupped in the rose bush next to me.
Two eggs the size of jellybeans,
soon birds so tight in the nest
one sits on the other
until they fly,
following the mother’s call,
her breeze,
as she hovers, eyes gleaming.
I haven’t seen my mother
since she died,
her woolen eyes
as green as mine—
my mother who claimed
her dead sister visited once
to share a cigarette. She’s not
on this summer-visit bench,
bare feet on brick,
admiring my wall of bougainvillea,
flicking ash onto folded tinfoil.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 23, Issue 6.
Jill Klein holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a BA from Stanford University. In between came years of stay-at-home parenting and a career in commercial lending. Her poems have been published in Bellingham Review, Borderlands, Cold Mountain Review, Radar Poetry, Rattle, The Fourth River, Tupelo Quarterly, and others. She lives in the heart–if there is such a thing–of Silicon Valley.
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