[312 words]
In January I watch a red-tailed hawk perch in the catalpa next door. I take a picture and send it to my neighbor, who, in turn, shares pictures with me of the same bird, same tree, except in his photos you can see a pair of crows, not a murder, not a mob, but enough to menace. It makes no sense. It’s not nesting season. Standing on a near-naked bough, framed by the catalpa’s gnarled bean pods, they watch the hawk. My neighbor is a poet. He’ll distill this spectacle into a haiku and post it online. He’ll get three likes.
On the neighborhood page they argue about outdoor cats and songbirds, carpenter bee traps and pollinators. It snowed seven inches, and the guy in the house next to Rose’s Funeral Home posts a photo of a jeep and a Ford F-150 doing doughnuts around a light pole. Does anybody know who these folks are going crazy in the mortuary parking lot? The comments are hilarious, until someone says get a fuckin life. And the thread dies.
Facebook had a search function for mapping relationships among its billion members. I want to graph search my neighborhood and watch what happens, find the intersection between those on the side of stray dogs and bees and mockingbirds and those who post police BOLOS and Nest videos and who report gunshots when a car backfires. I amuse myself to death, imagining the connections. But that search is over. Software developers call it deprecation, which is to say the risks outweigh the benefits. Better options exist.
My neighbor posts a photo of bread loaves cooling on wire racks: First bread of the year, he says. Homemade and warm. Later in the evening, he’ll share a loaf of that bread, quietly leaving it by my front door. I’ll find it in the morning. And I’ll like it.
Jennifer Lubke is a former classroom teacher and college professor, now working as an instructional designer for a large health care corporation, where AI bots are slowly taking over. In recognition of this fact, Jennifer is now exploring other career paths. While she’s thought about poetry for most of her 55 years, she only started writing it in 2024.
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