Plague

Poetry by Rebecca Foust | From Issue 28 (Spring 2025)

When I set up the feeder          the birds came 
              like leaves in wind          so many 
I felt subsumed by them     made small     one cell 
in a body     one word in the Iliad     one bit 
             in an infinite string of code          like living 
in a world dying of plague          each death tolled 
in numbers & graphs          in the nightly knell 
of names read aloud          singular-then-blurred
so many          I had not thought death 
             had undone so many  

I could not fathom those numbers     or imagine
             so many birds          in the world    
nor feral cats         a long feline line flowing 
like water  along the back fence     &     sometimes
             gazing back with amber eyes into mine          
nor could I have imagined          the river of rats          
running  ahead of those claws          but it was 
mostly the birds & the cats           then          
in the last months      the foxes          a pair of them          
silent faces white & taut under the moon          
             such radiant triangles

Rebecca Foust (she/her)

Rebecca Foust won the 2024 James Dickey Prize and the 2023 New Ohio Review Prize and is the author of Only (Four Way Books 2023) and Shine & Blur, from Backbone Press.

Author Note:

This poem was written during the pandemic when I was rereading 1984 and is from a new chapbook forthcoming from Backbone Press, Shine & Blur, that uses the lens of the love story between Winston and Julia to focus on the disturbing parallels between Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia and our own emerging political landscape. I wanted to capture what I was feeling then, a kind of overwhelming lived objective correlative in which the natural world felt overwhelmingly indifferent and even hostile to human interests.