Wild Thing: a rooster poem...

...and three poems about animals on Johnny Carson. This month's dive into the archive involves birds, comedy, and ancient art.

In my first letter of this series, I wrote about rescuing a parrot during the lockdown in 2020.

A few weeks ago my students found an injured bird outside of our classroom at NYU and we used my hat and scarf to get them to the Wild Bird Fund. This time of year there are lots of fledglings to be found, even a nest of them right by my mom’s front door when I visited for Mother’s Day.

can you spy the nest?

This past Friday, I was having coquito with a friend when a fledging flew into the cafe and landed on my arm.

They’d hit the wall before finding us, so we decided it was best to take them uptown, too…and so we got them into a box to the rescuers.

For this month’s archival dig, I’ll be sharing three poems, a series called “Three Johnny Carson poems” that were published in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2021. Two as they were originally published (below), featuring birds, and the third behind the paywall. You can get a trial, subscribe, or go to the original publisher here to read all three together. Enjoy! :)