CONNIE WIENEKE
Current Events: April 1, 2021
My nephew tells his mother songbirds are dying. This, what he has to say in his allotted five-minute call from prison. Five minutes to say pine siskins keeling over from salmonella. The CDC warns of outbreaks. Like, surges in coronavirus. Like, the uptick in obesity rates. Take it down, Mom. Where he lives wildlife approach the fence. Birds small enough ease between chain link and the loops, as if there were no razor wire. The inmates, large and ungainly, like to offer the black-tailed deer, when they dare to come near, their leftover crumbs. As if bread and carrots the words they couldn’t pass on to family and friends when they came to visit. My nephew sees their hesitancy. At Clallam Bay Corrections Center he has eight years to think: no view of the sea or a China freighter sky high with a rainbow of containers or a pod of orcas off-shore hunting. His friend dead. On Google-earth the trees retreat from the wired fence. From where my nephew sleeps and eats, works his shifts sewing masks for hospitals, he will never see a cormorant or a ring-necked duck. In his eight years he will never sleep and eat in the fancy resort with its world-class birding just down the road on the bay, never add a murrelet or murre to his life list. He is worried for the birds at his mother’s Tacoma feeder and bird bath, salmonellosis killing off finches faster than a Sharp-shinned hawk can. Mom, people have been getting sick. People ignorant with their naming confuse etymologies, point fingers at purported culprits. Probably the shootings will begin. This time salmon, if any escape over the weirs and past dams, like corvids mistaken as carriers of covid. You need to bleach everything, Mom.
Connie Wieneke’s prose and poetry often focuses on the exchanges between people and the animate world, on the give and take. Sometimes it has taken her years to figure out those interstices and consequences. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Stand, Talking River Review, Weber: The Contemporary West, Split Rock Review, Pilgrimage, and other journals and anthologies. Keeping track of the world outside her door keeps her busy.