x
Menu

Ellen Bass

Ellen Bass is the author of Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love, which won the Lambda Literary Award. She has been awarded the Missouri Review’s Larry Levis Award, the Greensboro Poetry Prize, and the New Letters Poetry Prize. Her nonfiction books include The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, which has sold over a million copies and has been translated into ten languages. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University.

Birdsong from My Patio

I’ve never heard this much song, / trills pure as crystal bells, / but not like bells: alive, small rushes / of air from the tiny plush lungs….