Magpie
infernally
multiple,
gangster-gaggle
in a poplar snag,
long liver,
egg sucker,
eater of eyes,
murderer of unfledged
nestlings,
carrion cleaner
of our own
assorted
homicides –
deer,
dog, feral
cats, porcupine, never
mind,
hardly
a blood trace
left
by the next
afternoon –
glorious harlequin
Magpie,
coal snow
burnt ash
night moon
examiner,
and us
except as surfeit
flesh
found
wanting.
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B.J. Buckley is a Wyoming and Montana poet and writer who has worked in Arts-in-Schools/Communities programs throughout the west for over 35 years. She is currently Writer-in-Residence for Sanford Arts at Sanford Cancer Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and is a teacher of visual arts workshops at Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art, Great Falls, Montana. Her poems have appeared widely in both print and on-line magazines, including CutThroat: A Journal of the Arts; The Cortland Review; Big Sky Journal; Distinctly Montana; Green Mountains Review; Prime Number; Up the Staircase; American Arts Quarterly; Epiphany; Ellipsis; Prime Number; Owen Wister Review; MezzoCammin; and Visions International. B. J. ‘s work also appears in the anthologies Leaning Into the Wind, Woven on the Wind, and Crazy Woman Creek, Houghton Mifflin; and Birds in the Hand: Fiction and Poetry About Birds, Henry Holt. Her books of poetry include Artifacts, Willow Bee Publishing, Saratoga, Wyoming; Moonhorses and the Red Bull, with co-author Dawn Senior-Trask, ProngHorn Press, Greybull, Wyoming; and a letterpress chapbook, Spaces Both Infinite and Eternal, Limberlost Press, Boise, Idaho. B. J. has been the recipient of many awards, including the 2012 Comstock Review Poetry Prize; The Joy Harjo Poetry Prize from CutThroat: A Journal of the Arts; The Rita Dove Poetry Award from the Center for Women Writers at Salem College, Winston-Salem, NC; The Cumberland Poetry Review’s Robert Penn Warren Narrative Poetry Prize; a Wyoming Literature Fellowship; and residencies at The Ucross Foundation and The Vermont Studio Center.