Amy Holman

BIRD HEARTS RACING

Note: Burd, ME, from OE, bryd, bride; chiefly Scottish, “a young woman”

Already, chestnut-bellied finches know confinement—
held in men’s hands—and confusing wind without their wing dips

buffeted, when 34 are slotted in orange hair rollers, packed
in a duffle carry-on, and flown to New York for bird racing.

Not a contest of flight speeds, for wouldn’t they always be taking it
too far, undulating over each finish line and into canopies

of the Parks Department’s plantings? It’s a competition of paired
male songbirds—finches superior to any other—singing to

win men thousands or hundreds, owners or bettors. Bird emotions
are controversial to some humans who specify these residual

dinosaurs, yet the four-chambered hearts do allow fear.
In Guyana, a man bicycles through heavily degraded former forest

with a finch in his fist. The engine of the heart ignites in the breeze
and wings agitate a palm. Man in a room plays a tape of the teeeyeees

and teeeyooos of the last winning finch, training his capture
to sing the same best. Finches will want someone, they will tire

of cover tunes. Where are their burds, these birds must wonder,
their perfected songs of prowess and pure love exploding

in the quiet air? In the remaining forests, the shes tune their ears
to untutored males, each pair enraptured by their specificity.


Amy reads "Bird Hearts Racing":



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Amy confesses: "Loneliness and agency are the beginnings of this poem. Individuality versus possession. A brief news piece about bird smugglers caught at JFK a year ago, with the photograph of finch beaks poking out of hair rollers broke my heart. I needed to know what kind of finch. Wikipedia was too helpful with its list of 228 species, but when I typed in “finch smuggling JFK” plus “Ornithology News,” I was rewarded with an in-depth report that included the species and facts about smugglers and singing competitions. That’s when I found my way to the hearts of the birds."

AMY HOLMAN is a poet, literary consultant, and artist staying put in Brooklyn, New York. Her poems have recently appeared in Gargoyle, Blueline, BigCityLit, Live Nude Poems, and Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea, the 2019 anthology from great weather for MEDIA. She is the author of the collection, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window, published in 2010 with Somondoco Press, and four chapbooks. She teaches workshops occasionally through The Hudson Valley Writers Center, and was an instructor for Environmental Creative Writing at the Tarrytown Arts Camp in July.