Poem of the Week | May 12, 2025

“Orioles” by Emma De Lisle is our Poem of the Week.

Emma De Lisle’s recent poems can be found in The Adroit Journal, The Boiler, Denver Quarterly, Image, North American Review, and West Branch, among other journals. She has been a finalist for Texas Review Press’s X. J. Kennedy Prize, YesYes Books’s Pamet River Prize, the Sewanee Review Poetry Award, Frontier Poetry’s Open Prize, and the Los Angeles Review Poetry Award. Currently, she studies religion in a PhD program at Harvard, and she serves as Associate Editor of Peripheries, Poetry Chair for the 2025 Massachusetts Book Awards, and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Mark.

Orioles

We like to think we are helpless. When they appeared I didn’t think
to slow down, it was a vision, I was having it, they had no bodies.
They were touching each other. Mating, maybe. Mating?
They tumbled, kept tumbling, I caught up with them, mouth
open, foot nowhere near the brake, and I felt it: the softest thud,
the color of them still surging to the right, rising again, but in
the mirror I saw it—the crest, and then the fall, a fountain
meeting its peak. Firework, swallowed. Mid-parabola.
The descent rushed, light-striped, one flung bolt reeled back
down to its mate on the ground, its mate or its rival, both
of them beating their bright wings against the road. Struggling
and falling again. Their beautiful wings. The spectacle of them
suspended in the sun, the beautiful thing, the need to touch it.
Why shouldn’t I press forward? And the weight, the weight of it
flapping alive in front of me, still alive, and the unyielding steel of my need.

Author’s Note

“Orioles” is a poem from the manuscript of my first book, currently titled Imitator. It was written by voice-recording, immediately after hitting a bird with a very old car. I was driving from Florence to Easthampton on Massachusetts Route 10.