Thirst
art by Stephen Ground
by Jesse Wallis
For the bit of moisture in a dove chick’s brain,
the Gila woodpecker has been known to drill
through the soft skulls of unattended nestlings
while their parents gather seeds. Defenseless,
the chicks are still alive while this is happening.
The brooder mourning doves return to carcasses.
Its forked tongue having never tasted the bitter-
sweet, fleshy fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge
of Good and Evil, the woodpecker lives outside
the airy sphere of right and wrong. A desert bird,
it knows only from dull instinct that water is life.
Barbed, tacky, its resting tongue is long enough
to snake all the way around the inside of its skull.
To protect the untroubled brain from the extreme
and persistent force of its own needling survival.
Jesse Wallis has been a finalist for the University of Wisconsin Press Poetry Series, the Off the Grid Prize, and the Zone 3 Press Book Award in Poetry. His poems have appeared in Bennington Review, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, North American Review online, Ploughshares, Southern Poetry Review, and The Southern Review. His work is also featured in Best Small Fictions 2025 (Alternating Current Press). Jesse studied writing and film at the University of Iowa and art at Syracuse University and the California Institute of the Arts. After living in Japan for nine years, he returned to the Phoenix metro area, where he was born and raised and where he now works in human resources for a public school district. For more of his poetry, visit jessewallispoet.com.
Stephen Ground is a writer, filmmaker, and picture-taker based in Treaty Six Territory [Edmonton, Canada].
