"Inside a Texas Whole Foods"
by Robin Turner
on a day straddling winter & spring—a grackle. From rafter to rafter, it flew its blue-black. A baby squealed. Shoppers stopped shopping, raised their bowed heads from grocery lists & produce decisions, looked up from bouquets plush with peonies, from magazine stands & the checkout queue. Little pockets of bird story sprang up here & there between strangers. Back in the parking lot we tapped grackle into our phones & just for a moment read grace.
Robin Turner's poems, prose poems, and flash fiction have most recently appeared in Rattle, The Texas Observer, Rust + Moth, Amethyst Review, Bracken Magazine, and Haunted, a Porkbelly Press anthology. She lives in North Texas and works with teen writers online.