Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2022
Unintended Consequences at Mack Lake, 1980
S.D. Dillon The controlled burn spirals Out of control, Torches the Jack pine habitat Rebuilt in narrow columns, and fades into charred remains. Things cool down. Birds nest. The return of Kirtland’s warbler From the precipice Brought out haters, with posters: red circle & a slash Through a female black-throated blue warbler.
S.D. Dillon has been published in the Detroit Free Press, FIELD, The South Carolina Review, the Hawai’i Pacific Review, The RavensPerch, and Lighthouse Weekly, and his poetry is forthcoming in Walloon Writers Review, Tar River Poetry, and Tampa Review. He has an AB from Princeton and an MFA from Notre Dame, where he was Managing Editor of The Bend in 2004. He subsequently worked for three years in the editorial departments of a boutique literary agency and Carroll & Graf Publishers, where he acquired and edited a handful of titles. He lives in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
Crow envies the bees Peter Grandbois Whose thoughts never betray them when their children fall to that temple constructed of web And the woodpeckers, who are too busy to choose the wrong things to love
48