Premonition
Alex Braslavsky
Moisture rolls down the necks
of mallards that toss their bright heads.
Their ebony eyes engulf the mire.
Their feet pedal down and churn.
We let you go.
Clumped ashes in shallow water,
as if a hydrogen baby-bomb has gone up
in the cloud of things you once were.
We feed the rest of the birds
Chunks of stale bread.
Their webbed feet soak in these ashes,
The sky speckles with your winging.
Backing away
all the way
past horizon.
We watch the ducks float over.
Alex Braslavsky is a poet, scholar, and translator working towards her doctorate at Harvard and working on Polish, Czech, and Russian poetry. She is the translator of On Centaurs & Other Poems (World Poetry Books, 2023) by Zuzanna Ginczanka. Her poems appear in The Columbia Review, Conjunctions, Colorado Review, and more.