Andrea Cohen
Do you know the difference
between a bluebird
and a blue jay?
Yes, I say.
What is it? he asks.
How cruel for the blue jay
to demand proof.
He’s made sure I’ve never
seen the rare bluebird
of happiness, not
even in a picture book.
They’re both blue,
I say. One stands
for happiness,
the other one is you.
Andrea Cohen’s most recent poetry collection is Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry). She directs The Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.
“The first front porch that mattered to me was on a cobblestone street in Iowa City, where I lived with three fabulous writers, women who favored beautiful, clackety, manual typewriters—Underwoods and Royals and Remingtons—and who typed all seasons on that porch. The front porch across the street was always empty, the shades on its wide windows always drawn. More than a few poems and stories imagined what might have been happening behind those shades.
Where I live now has a traditional sort of Victorian front porch, which I love, though mostly I sit on the porch steps. It’s a sort of in-between place, and sitting there gives me a fighting chance of intercepting our hounds, Daisy and Beckett, who like to lounge on the porch proper until their favorite prey—a passing tabby or thundering UPS truck—causes them to bolt, baying, toward the street.”