Norm Jenson

“Understanding is but the sum of our misunderstandings.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“Outside the vintage shop, the one-footed grackle hopped along the concrete blocks. His mouth was jacked open. He eyed Thea: I’m a bird, but I could fuck you up.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Souvenir Museum

“The Wheatear PAUL BATCHELOR | 93 words Up for good at five, watching the small rain settle light as pollen on rosehip & nettle in my excuse for a garden, light-headed, thinking how little I had to complain of - no job, no kids, no wife; the life I chose, a life painted on glass; each girl a cure for the one before - I looked & saw a wheatear, a Saharan wheatear teetering on my excuse for a garden wall, seeing without a tear myself, an easy figure trying to recall what, if anything, he was flying from. PAUL BATCHELOR”
― Anonymous

“Song I try to make the step-down call of the chickadee, but do it too insistently, over and over so it loses sense, the air going equally out and back, not slower in the opening, then quickening as the tight hinge retracts, but absolutely evenly, too even, the way one breathes and regulates breath for a doctor, to present the body’s equanimity. There’s a bird in a tree with a hinge in its throat, a door opening to let the sweet air pass from a high, thin place down a notch. There’s phlox out there, opening between one black and another black, hanging branch of an apple tree—the very tree that holds the bird that bends the air so parenthetically around itself, and its song around anything listening.”
― Lia Purpura, On Looking: Essays