Josh English
Winter 2025 | Poetry
Elegy with waiting room
“You are surely lost. The waiting room / is teeming / with pigeons.”
- Magdalena Zurawski
on the day after the accident my lungs filled with pigeons
when I say every time I coughed one came up
I mean it less as a condition of breathing
& more as evidence the cage of my body is full
& so there I was—staring at a row of faux oak chairs
rolling up bits of tissue in my jacket pockets
what is expressed through form imposes itself as presence
the electrodes in your brain on an x-ray glow
I cough & a pigeon bursts from my bronchus
covered in mucus all jerk & wallow bobbing on the floor
if I tell this story my way without actually telling the story
everyone will assume that you died
I am back home sitting in my parents’ bedroom
staring out the window at a devourous green forest
nobody has died
Josh English's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Lana Turner Review, Bennington Review, Omniverse, West Branch, and elsewhere. He lives and teaches in NJ and is the lead editor for Public Poetry, a non-profit focused on community poetry events.