Thursday
October 18, 2018
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Next Line, Please

Each Tuesday, our readers contribute a new line of verse—or a completed poem—in collaboration with a renowned poet.

Previous posts

The False Confession

by David Lehman | Tuesday, October 16, 2018

“For Years You’ve Kept Me Hanging …”

by David Lehman | Wednesday, October 10, 2018

A Wardrobe of Excuses

by David Lehman | Tuesday, October 02, 2018

Let the Names Begin

by David Lehman | Tuesday, September 25, 2018

“What’s in a Name?”

by David Lehman | Tuesday, September 18, 2018

The Best of Everything

by David Lehman | Tuesday, September 11, 2018

The Best Is Here to Stay

by David Lehman | Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Of Rivers, Lovers, Battles, and Repetitions

by David Lehman | Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Checkmate in 10 Moves

by David Lehman | Tuesday, August 14, 2018

How to Cheat

by David Lehman | Tuesday, August 07, 2018
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THIS WEEK’S ARCHIVE PICK

A Bird in Hand

by Erik Anderson

Basements can hold mysterious treasures: long-lost letters, old photo albums, forgotten mementos. For writer Erik Anderson, the basement of a Lancaster, Pennsylvania museum sparked a different mystery altogether. What was the body of a 19th century black-tailed trainbearer, a bird native to South America, doing among the exhibits? As Anderson searches through library archives to find an answer, his detective work turns into a meditation on the delicate balance between protecting nature and destroying it. “Why attempt to preserve something as fleeting as a bird’s life? Is this curiosity, or are we holding on too tight?” he writes in a 2016 essay for the Scholar. The more he searches, the more he comes to understand the impulse to preserve beauty where we find it. After all, “Humans may be all brain, but birds are all heart.”