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Michelle Bitting is the author of six poetry collections: Dummy Ventriloquist (C & R, 2024); Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural De Novo First Book Award; Notes to the Beloved, which won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award; The Couple Who Fell to Earth; Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize; and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize. Bitting is a lecturer in poetry and creative writing at Loyola Marymount University and in film studies at University of
Arizona Global.

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Nature
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Finch Me

An iPoem

by Michelle Bitting
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Because you’re too far from where I sit to admire
Your finery up close, my goldfinch beauties, my feral
Canaries of the radiant displays—lemon-olive
Feathers tucked in tight for bouncier flight—coal-
Black wings, tail and cap the females lack, I’m
Forced to telescope my lens, close up capture
Your needled feeding, thistle sock teat your
Sharpened beaks pierce and milk across the yard—

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