Cal Freeman

Another Drinking Song
 
Who gives a damn if birds are coming back?
They sing their nonsense in the April lawn.
I stayed up picking tunes until the dawn,
Drank wine and listened to Blood on the Tracks.
The blue spruce grows in crowned three-fingered bracts.
All winterlong its warblers were gone,
All through this spate of benders I’ve been on.
I wish the sky would scroll itself to black.

But what the chestnut-sided warbler had to learn
While making winter’s migratory rounds
Through temperate Pacific mountain vales
Is that the world will freeze and thaw and burn
While men and birds still sing their hopeful songs
For straw, red wine, or ale.

Cal Freeman (he/him) is the author of the books Fight Songs (Eyewear 2017) and Poolside at the Dearborn Inn (R&R Press 2022). His writing has appeared in many journals including Atticus Review, Image, The Poetry Review, Verse Daily, Under a Warm Green Linden, North American Review, Panoply Zine, Oxford American, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Advanced Leisure. He is a recipient of the Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes), winner of Passages North Neutrino Prize, and a finalist for the River Styx International Poetry Prize. Born and raised in Detroit, he teaches at Oakland University and serves as Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit. His chapbook of poems, “Yelping the Tegmine”, has just been released, and his hybrid full-length collection, The Weather of Our Names, is due out this year from Cornerstone Press.