Jenny Isaacs

Passerina ciris (Painted Bunting)


I sent a photo (green and yellow, blurred)
for confirmation when she first began
flashing from bush to millet and back again;
far out of range, this winter-traveling bird.

Birders came to document her presence
for themselves. I learned her shape and color
in daily window glimpses, grown familiar
after several weeks of feeder visits.

It's March today, and I think every day
she might be poised to fly off – like your daughter
ready to live halfway around the clock,

on her toes, almost, in your photo from JFK –
mapless and capable, unafraid to wander,
in every departure the seeds of her coming back.

Jenny Isaacs has an undergraduate degree in writing poetry from Johns Hopkins University. She wrote around the edges of her life while raising 3 daughters with her husband and founding and directing several nonprofits, including a program to teach conversion of ordinary gas cars to electric (before production EV’s became widespread); a Montessori school; and a county-wide immigrant rights group providing legal services to undocumented community members threatened with detention and deportation.  Now (mercifully) retired from immigration work, she’s returned to writing and submitting poetry. Her first chapbook, The Argument of Time, will be published by Finishing Line Books in 2026, and she has had poems published this year in Pedestal, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Thimble Literary Magazine, Mezzo Cammin, and Bulb Culture Collective, with more forthcoming in Neologism Poetry Review, and Willows Wept.