Facing Shenandoah Avenue. 2026.
The building was originally constructed at the start of the 20th Century as office space for Norfolk & Western Railroad.
Avian altercation! A chirpity-chirpity ruckus erupted at my fifth floor windowsill this morning … two sparrows were biting and plucking at a third. The aggressors had darker head coloring; the victim’s was lighter — I’m guessing this means it was either a female or a juvenile?
I tapped the glass pretty hard, and the bad birds took off. Then this beleaguered bird-twerp hung out for a minute and actually looked at me as if in acknowledgment. (Yeah, the picture quality is cruddy, but you can see the little fluff-nugget looking at me.)
I started searching my memory for a bird-themed superhero I could then proclaim myself to be … but both Marvel’s “Falcon” and Michael Keaton’s “Birdman” (2014) seemed fairly lame. My girlfriend, who is ever more cultured than I am, invoked Walt Whitman instead:
“I sound my barbaric ‘YAWP’ over the roofs of the world!!!”
The original source for this photo is the National Archives; I found it via the cool people at Virginia Life Stories.
I thought Dracula had arrived in Roanoke — which would be weird, because there’s no place for The Demeter to dock.
Either that or my lifelong descent into madness had finally yielded its first visual hallucinations.
Turns out these thick metal implements were left there by an excavating company. They’re just smallish plow blades for pushing aside snow, seen from the rear. (They are open on the other side.)
The past year was the best ever for poetry and commentary, with publications in the United States, Britain, Ireland, Germany, India and Bangladesh — along with a short story publication in Chile.
You can find all the links to my 2025 poetry and commentary at the link below. Thanks for coming along for the ride. 🙂
2025.