The Last Pie Bird
By Judith Skillman

A crusty fellow
ripe with juice and seeds.
A bit of bling shoved
beneath the crust.

Proof a secret prison might lie,
like a shunt, to wick steam.
The heat in its belly makes berries
burst like bombs—

the Marion, the blue, the raspberry.
Four and twenty blackbirds
come from the essence of sugar.
Betrayal killed the lyric,

but the pie bird survived.
Its neck stretches into the kitchen
for air. Sing a bit, wee bird.
We’ve forgotten what a trinket means.

Teach us how to wrest
sweetness from our days
when the second has been broken
down to a millisecond, the particle

arrayed as quark and halo,
the genome come unbraided,
and Dolly-the-sheep cloned.
Pie bird, bard of Orpheus,

the river’s gone black and berry-thick
with hell and how to get there..

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