Maria Giesbrecht, Third Place winner in Narrative’s 2026 Winter Story Contest and a finalist in the Seventeenth Annual Poetry Contest, is the author of the debut poetry collection A Little Feral (Write Bloody, 2026). She is the winner of the 2025 Jack McCarthy Award and an MFA candidate at the University of Guelph. She lives near Toronto, Canada.

Photo credit: David Casco

White Birds

by Maria Giesbrecht

At three, I stepped on Dad’s liquor
bottle and now there’s a robin’s
nest, faint and white, on the inside
of my left foot. It never went away.
Sometimes, when I’m silent, I can hear
our old neighbor’s Ford like yesterday

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