Birdened
Walking my way to a graduation advising session
I think: Twenty-seven and still
living at home.
My ripped-seam backpack stuffed
with so much right-brain material. An awkward
struggle of weight
over my shoulder: my spine curls
and I wonder
if my scoliosis is caused by the lightness
in my left-brain.
I find a gray chick, neck twisted,
hunch-backed and chirping at me with one eye—
It doesn’t peck at bugs
but bites at its feet in the grass.
The mangled ball of feathers cupped in my palms
tests a jump and fly. But with one wing
shorter than the other, it flops right back
down, thrashing to press itself
on its feet.
I pick it up again,
Where is your mother? I say.
A sea of twittering in the foliage above me,
I wait—
but none descend to rescue
their crippled kin.
So I bend to remove my shoe,
plop down in the grass,
take off my sticky sock—
If education is what we think as flight
I may as well chew on my own feet.
Salt Sick
I pull a silver fork through snarls
of bronze caked brittle hair.
The wash of sea is gray and sick
with briny bones of fish.
My skin breathes a pale glow
through a coat, salt-thick
and iodine-rich,
as a man stands tall
in a stiff black suit
surf unlacing around his feet.
He’s watching—
my body beached
on a high rock, sharp
beneath my scales.
I sink my heart into my spine,
wrap my fins around me tight.
I’m almost sure he sees me here
metallic in the dusk.
A swoop and cry from a gull above,
I look down to pearls
strung on seaweed overflow
my shiny shell of abalone.
Hands full of saline water
fail to fill my thirst.
My tail’s encrusted with salmon stench.
I am chewing sand—
for the man’s mind marvel:
The endless illusion
of sea touching sky,
the horizon’s gust of breath.
Oh, no, these shells
are not enough.
Abstract: “Salt Sick” is the product of an Ekphrastic study of John William Waterhouse’s 1901 painting, “A Mermaid”. The free verse poem illustrates the feminine desire for life and the masculine longing for release.
Good work sweetpea