by Amrutha Prabhu
Rude Birds
We could be you: having observed
Your day-walks, night-walks, cat-walks,
We have developed street-wisdom.
Our wings would easily fit a wristwatch;
We’d look good in nightwear. We could
Design our own shirtwaists: brash,
And sassy. Nothing to it, really.
As for your work: who couldn’t craft,
Drift, salt, ghostwrite? Anyone could
Do that. We could. We build houses
Of twigs and twine. We walk tightwires
Like it’s nothing at all. We spot jointworms,
Heartworms, in fruitwood and heartwood –
you could never do what we do
On a daily basis, you hairy beasts.
Lorelei Bacht (she/they) lives and writes in the Southeast Asian jungle. When she is not carrying little children around or encouraging them to discover the paintings of Edvard Munch, she can be found collecting bones and failing scientific experiments. She has also been known to befriend orb weavers and millipedes. Her recent work can be found and/or is forthcoming in OpenDoor Poetry, Litehouse, Visitant, Quail Bell, The Wondrous Real, Slouching Beast Journal, SWWIM, Abridged, PROEM and Odd Magazine. She is also on Instagram: @lorelei.bacht.writer and on twitter: @bachtlorelei.
Amrutha Prabhu, a computer engineer, discovered her love for poems and art in her mid-30-ies. Having worked as a software developer for more than 13 years, she strongly feels that life’s most meaningful things are not things. A nature lover and cooking enthusiast. She considers herself fortunate to be an Indian and values her rich culture and heritage. Of all roles that she plays, she feels, being a learner – most enjoyable, being a mother – most challenging, and being a woman – most vulnerable. Her love for learning, art and poems found home at Haiku, Haiga and related Japanese forms of poetry. She has several of her works published in reputed journals. She is a kind of person who makes little happy notes of moments that makes life worth living. Most of the times it is arrested through her poems and paintings; or expressed through food. She believes at 80, she might be cherishing these little happy notes that made her days.