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Mollie O’Leary is a poet from Massachusetts. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. Mollie’s chapbook The Forgetting Curve was selected for publication in 2023 through Poetry Online’s chapbook contest and is currently in its fifth printing. Her poetry has appeared in Chestnut Review, wildness, McNeese Review, and elsewhere. Find more of her work at mollieoleary.com.

Birding Aubade

Mollie O’Leary

In your room, the morning cups
my face, and I let it. You ask,
Do you hear an owl? Soft O notes
circle above us like small aural
suns. The source: a mourning
dove. My whole life I’ve thought
that sound was an owl, you say,

and I agree it’s difficult to find
the seam between certain strands
of subtlety. For years, I confused touch
for tenderness, assumed a lack
of hunger meant I was full.
And joy? I imagined it
the same as relief, a thin wing
flickering in green-dark leaves.

I’m saying, I stared at trees
for a long time as if I knew
a starling from a sparrow
from a chickadee. I’m saying,
before you, a bird was just
a bird to me.

— Mollie O’Leary

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