Bangor Studio/Membership Department
63 Texas Ave.
Bangor, ME 04401

Lewiston Studio
1450 Lisbon St.
Lewiston, ME 04240

Portland Studio
323 Marginal Way
Portland, ME 04101

Registered 501(c)(3) EIN: 22-3171529
© 2025 Maine Public
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Scroll down to see all available streams.

Untitled

Today's poem is Untitled by Alice Hotopp. It is read by Samaa Abdurraqib.

Untitled

He named you Nelson's.
Brandt's, Lazuli's, Ross', Cassin's,
Harris', Gambel's, Smith's, Townsend's,
Williamson's, he swapped your
eyes for glass beads, organs for
cotton, scrawled your new
Name on a tag looped around your
brittle tarsus, cocked your head to the
side to peer out of a glass case
or stacked you in drawers to no longer
gather moss for nests or the meat of red
berries, just time. And stiffness in wings.
He named you Newell's and Townsend's, he
clubbed your last chicks to death, plucked you
from the sky by the thousands, the tens of thousands.
What of himself did he see in you?
I would name you light.
I would name you incandescent
wings, golden eye ring, feathered
head plume, zing of wind,
I would name you indigo
bead placed in your bower, nine air
sacs worked like bellows, syrinx of song
I would name you restlessness, stamping
clawed feet yearning north each spring,
cryptochrome in eyes animating the planet's
electromagnetic fields, rachis
branching into barb branching into
barbule branching into barbicel,
I would name you ocean
spray, drip of jungle mist, warm air
currents that swirl and rise to the sun,
I would name you every mile
you migrate, every wingbeat, every egg
tooth cracking open the world's light,
dinosaur that you are, theropod,
survivor of meteors and mass extinctions.
But mostly
I would name you nothing.