The Balloon Bouquet

by Robert McDonald

It’s spring, and sticks
and dead limbs have fallen
from the trees.
When I walk
on the roadway here

at Rosehill, last year’s leaves
scuttle
behind me,
urged on by the wind. Trapped
in high branches, the sad

foil tatters
of someone’s birthday balloon
flash and twist, speared
like fish. The crows
in nearby oaks yell

with some derision
that the balloon bouquet
had been given
to someone for whom birthdays
were over. The crows

don’t know anyone beneath
these eroded
headstones,
but they love the sky;
alive, alive

they shout to anyone
who listens; the crows love
their perches,
the ten thousand
bent fingers

of the trees,
and the lawn;
like so much
of the land,
it used to be a meadow

Robert McDonald’s first book of poems, A Streetlight That’s Been Told It Used to Be the Moon, is coming from Roadside Press in 2026. His work has appeared in Does It Have Pockets, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Marrow, Gyroscope, Tabula Rasa Review, and The Madrid Review, among others. He lives with his husband in Chicago.