Discomfit

Someone sent me something

last week. (It doesn’t matter

what it is. What’s important

is it arrived unbroken.)

For five days, it’s been

resting inside a neat box.

Every day, I remove it

for a few moments, place it

on the windowsill, observe it

from a few angles: sometimes

here’s light, sometimes

here’s the shadow

of the pigeon on

the window, examining

me as I examine. The pigeon,

gray, confounded, leaves

me in peace, finally. (I worry

I’m in love with this thing,

at least have developed

a reverence for it that feels

too intimate.) I apologize —

perhaps it was a trick

of the light, a sort of gratitude

after so long with just

known walls, their known

contents, the daily pigeon, her

dark grays, here: I wanted.

Arden Levine is the author of Spoke (The Word Works’ Hilary Tham Capital Collection, forthcoming 2026; National Poetry Series Finalist, 2024), and Ladies’ Abecedary (Harbor Editions, 2021). Her writing appears in AGNI, Barrow Street, Harvard Review, RHINO, Indiana Review and elsewhere, and has been featured by Poetry Society of America, the Poetry Foundation, and WNYC's Radiolab. Arden is an urban planner and municipal public servant working/living in/for New York City.