Diagnosis

Call her in because it’s almost too dark
for the birds and squirrels, call her in

for it’s time to eat, to feed
what’s standing at the locked door, staring

while we shift what seems to her
furtively between plate and pot,

between sink and supper. Call the dog
and call the friend who, still

in hospital, called yesterday and the day
before when she called

I was home, but I didn’t answer,
couldn’t even call back.

Call the dog. Call the vine-choked oak,
the caterpillars crawling, chickadees

and crows. Yes, call the crow
and ask the way and what’s after.

Call it what it is:
harbinger.

Sarah Wetzel is the author of the poetry collection All Our Davids, released from Terrapin Books in 2019. She is also the author of River Electric with Light, which won the AROHO Poetry Publication Prize and was published by Red Hen Press in 2015, and Bathsheba Transatlantic, which won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and was published by Anhinga Press in 2010. When not shuttling between her two geographic loves—Rome, Italy and New York City—she is a PhD student in Comparative Literature in the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. She holds an engineering degree from Georgia Tech and a MBA from Berkeley. More importantly for her poetry, she completed a MFA in Creative Writing at Bennington College in January 2009. You can see some more of her work at www.sarahwetzel.com.