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Hugh Behm-Steinberg
Long-billed Curlews

The literature of sleep splits between those who say it’s about escape, you fall asleep and in your dreams you hang out with curlews on Candlestick Point, before the stadium was built, before the last flocks were shot down by hunters, you dream you’re wading through abundance and it worries you, because in your dreams wealth is only there to be lost, wrecked or stolen; you think the birds are oblivious, you keep trying to save them: one school says of course this keeps happening, you are asleep, so this is about death, it sucks, what sport is there to shooting long-billed curlews that hunters would climb into your dreams to wipe out even the imaginary ones? The breakdown is unpredictable so it’s hard to be trusting. Your habits are indefinite one curlew says, so it’s hard to maintain control. You’re asleep and erotic as you’re embodied; one school says we fall asleep to be downlisted, but I’m more hopeful than that. Barnaby claims the group he saw seemed preoccupied with stalking clumsily through the muck after small fish or grubs, but I think there’s nothing that’s clumsy; it’s an observational problem: you are not a curlew, you cannot tell if they’re being clumsy or careful, but Barnaby I’m asleep right now, or writing this poem, which is the same thing, which means I know, and now you know I know, you already knew, like the long-billed curlew telling my wife when we sleep we’re writing creation’s book, and in it we’re ok, we’re going to be ok.

Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books) and The Opposite of Work (JackLeg Press). Bird poems have appeared in such places as Spork (From Brown Thrashers - Part 1 and From Brown Thrashers - Part 2), Spiral Orb, The Bakery, Sink Review and On Barcelona. He teaches writing at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where he edits the journal Eleven Eleven.