Jack Cooper is author of the poetry collection Across My Silence (World Audience, Inc., 2007). His poetry, flash fiction, essays, and/or mini-plays have appeared in bosque, Bryant Literary Review, Connecticut River Review, North American Review, Rattle, Slab, Slant, The Briar Cliff Review, The MacGuffin, The Main Street Rag, The South Dakota Review, and many others. His work has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize. Recent awards include Grand Prize Winner in Crosswinds Poetry Journal’s 2016 Poetry Contest, and his poetry has been selected for Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” and Tweetspeak Poetry’s “Every Day Poems.” Cooper is the former communications director at the High Desert Museum in Bend, Oregon, and frequently writes about nature and the environment. He holds a bachelor's degree in Biology from the University of Redlands, attended graduate school in alpine botany at the University of Colorado, and earned a second bachelor's in English from the University of Trondheim, Norway. Cooper is co-editor of the online literary journal MacQueen’s Quinterly, www.macqueensquinterly.com. He lives in Eugene, Oregon, with his wife Kazuko.

L.A. RIVER

by Jack Cooper

I like how the mallard ducklings

goofy and weak

waddle up the cement incline

then slide into this run off

of lawn sprinklers and car washes

and how the great blue heron

seems to be teleported here

from the Jurassic

to look for extinct species of fish

but mostly I like the way

the little birds

fly in and out of the barbed wire

with only a smear of water

to keep them singing

© Jack Cooper. First published in Rattle, Issue #52, June 2016