Poetry / Taylor Franson-Thiel

:: Cardinalis Twice ::

	
Cherry blossoms are bonelaced
   across the sky and carrying a
      northern cardinal nest with babies gun-
   shy of flight. Into
      whose hand will they fall if
   I cannot catch them.
      Into which horizon
   thick with fingerthin petals
      will they leave me
   for? A part of me
      cannot handle being a human
   in spring. The blossoms pink
      and dead already in my palm.
   What spring knows is
      the cardinals will leave
   and I will not be able to go
      after them. That they cannot tell
   the difference between a gun and
      my palm. I have only shot
   a gun once, at clay pigeons in central Utah.
      It was spring and the buckshot splintered
   the red clay to white rubble
      falling to the dirt like
   petals or wings. I asked
      is this safe? not sure of
   what I meant by this. Each time a shot
      rang out, cardinals scattered
   like bloodsplatter against the sky.

From the writer

:: Account ::

I am inter­est­ed in a kind of poet­ics that does not believe in the bina­ry of the human world and the nat­ur­al world. A poet­ics where form, tra­di­tion­al and post-mod­ern, weaves the eco­log­i­cal onto the page. Beyond that my work ques­tions how we name things, and how nam­ing things presents a kind of pos­ses­sion in which our anthro­po­mor­phiza­tion assumes knowl­edge about the being (plant or ani­mal), rather than learn­ing from the being how to bet­ter engage with our world.

John Shoptaw writes in his essay “Why Ecopo­et­ry?” that ecopo­ems must be both about nature, and give an urgent unset­tling sense of some­thing need­ing to be done. I think some­times the thing being done should be pon­der­ing how we have come to talk about our land­scapes, the ani­mals we harm by overde­vel­op­ing, and how we think dif­fer­ent­ly about the plants whos names we do know ver­sus the ones we do not. The pon­der­ing itself, the rumi­na­tion on the human pow­er dynam­ic with­in the nat­ur­al world can be valu­able in how in then helps us to move through the world more consciously.

Tay­lor Fran­son-Thiel is the author of “Bone Val­ley Hym­nal” (ELJ Edi­tions 2025). She is a devel­op­men­tal and edi­to­r­i­al coor­di­na­tor for Poet­ry Dai­ly, the Assis­tant Poet­ry Edi­tor for phoebe and the EIC of BRAWL. She can be found @TaylorFranson on Twit­ter, @taylorfthiel on Insta­gram, @taylorfthiel.bsky.social on BlueSky, and at taylorfranson-thiel.com