The Biologist and The Birds 

It is her bedroom window 
the birds fly into and fly 

into, trying to get through. 
It happens only in daylight

though she worries in the night, after 
gently burying so many fallen bodies. 

It seems to stop when she moves 
her full-length mirror to another corner 

of the room. Perhaps it was the apparent 
patch of sky the birds were so frantic 

to beat their wings in. Science 
has no answers. Sometimes, she sits 

on the edge of the bed for hours 
in the morning silence, waiting. 


– first published in poetry pamphlet, Nothing Here Is Wild, Everything is Open (Southword, 2016)

A queer writer of odd things, Tania Hershman‘s second poetry collection, Still Life With Octopus, was published by Nine Arches Press in July 2022 and her debut hybrid novel, Go On, a “fictional-memoir-in-collage”, was published by Broken Sleep Books in Nov 2022. The author of three short story collections, Tania is editor of Fuel: An Anthology of Prize-Winning Flash Fictions Raising Funds to Fight Fuel Poverty (Feb 2023, http://www.fuelflash.net/), and has a PhD in creative writing inspired by particle physics. http://www.taniahershman.com