Nightcap by Barry Roth | Streetlight Magazine

The struggle with what they call the mind

opens new fronts. Migration, which should drop

new birds into my garden,

has not yet started, and the residents

have made themselves scarce this year.

I’m close to giving up my resistance

to deity, and to the admission

that solitude in age is not

the greatest refuge after all.

Hanging the hummingbird feeder

is a variant of my nightly trek to the corner

for the comfort of a sundowner.

Barry Roth is a writer, editor, and biologist living in San Francisco, California; his biology practice focuses on the lives and identities of the snails and slugs of North America. He earned a master’s degree in creative writing at San Francisco State University. His creative work has been published in Sequoia, The West Marin Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, and elsewhere, and anthologized in Under Thirty.