Porch nest scattered, emptied, I
am the one now sweeping
the rest from our doorstep: dead
grass, dead brush, dark hair
tufts stuck in the eave’s
bent railing: too slight
to support the weight of anything
but the idea of a nest, which you
thought a kindness to shelter.
But not now, not to me
trying and failing to scoop
the three nude bodies up, bluish
bruises for the eyes and each mouth
a garish triangle of yellow.
A postcard helps nudge them up
into the dustbin: skins
still plump from too-
warm blood; membranes moist
in the eye sockets; wingtips
wrinkled, soft as the hands
of the doctor fitting his newest
device inside me: thin, pin-
tails trailing their coppers.
Pink, blind, nimble
fingers and the neck-skin with its
ruddy creases. This
is going to pinch, he’d said, and the rest
of the week blood streamed, it ran,
it stuck in the pads I continually
changed out
so that my fingernails wore a rind
of red noticed too late
at the dinner table. Of course,
no nest, no bird, nothing to fly
to what shrills in the bones
like the call of this last chick
found in its nest remnants:
wave after wave
echoed down the block
where more birds
reply, embroidering
on the hunger. All over
are houses with nests
of birds: one chick each, one mouth
snapped open, worn as a clutch
purse. The chick’s head,
at rest, is hooded
as a cobra’s. Was it you
who said you didn’t want this
first? Was it me, one week
of every month, each month
for half the decades
of my life? And now
the squalling mouth that can’t
be filled, all the little bones
I could break apart. Every absence
was a choice. And now
the live chick’s cry begins, again,
to weaken. It tucks its head
into its febrile hood while I
scoop up the blue-
black neck, the bracken foot
of its brother, one wing tip
catching the skin
of a wrist as I gather it, its closed eye
closed to my own,
and the yellow mouth
cracked open–