Shining Cuckoo
by Rebecca Hawkes
Wednesdays every other week, I joined the women for dinner.
Three portions of chicken fricassée and gewürztraminer
then upstairs for dessert. After that, maybe something sweet
to eat— a plate of hummingbird cake with candied pineapple.
Those spring evenings, pīpīwharauroa whistled
from the bush outside the bedroom window. In their nest
a pair of warbling riroriro fed a begging chick
five times their size, its feathers sheened with bronze
and verdigris. My lovers drew the curtains tight. Later
I’d take my time in their shower, lathering vetiver cleansers
and oils scented with tonka bean. They understood
I wouldn’t stay til morning. Drove home, leftover
icing sweating in my lap. Running late one dinnertime
I saw a tiny riroriro chick tumbled on their steps. Pushed
or windblown, just a puff of down, pin-feathers stilled
before fledging. I scooped it up. Crept through the garden
to the creek where eels twined their bodies with slick bliss
in and out of water. I laid the small bird on the surface.
It floated like a dandelion seed on breath
then was consumed by darkness. As I slipped back
inside their house, the couple were not happy. What if
the neighbours saw, one said, and her wife said why not
let them see— anyway they had been thinking, and could clear
the flat’s spare room for me. Perhaps I should have done it.
Preened myself iridescent. Rent-free, well-fed, extravagant.
But I was no brood parasite. I knew what was not mine
and didn’t want their lives. I had my own, though it felt
almost weightless in the hand, and ever so easy to swallow.