“Everyone knows it’s good luck, if inconvenient, when a bird shits on you.”
On an April afternoon, writer and activist Marisol Cortez read this line from a Ross Gay poem to a small audience in the grass of San Antonio’s Brackenridge Park, part of an event dubbed “Words for Birds and the Trees They Live In.”
Cortez’s choice of poem was political. Behind her, hundreds of egrets and cormorants swooped around a stand of trees by a bend in the San Antonio River. A few daring people walked quickly under the birds, but stone picnic tables—plastered with white droppings—sat unused by parkgoers.
