“It is your very self” I tell him. He has never seen me. His quick coin of breath disappears on the glass as it forms: air that feeds his bones their portion willingly as it feeds mine. He spends his here, besieged by the dull birds who gather and whom he cannot touch, his own feathers red as wrought blood. Dear bird, how many selves must you vanquish? In the mornings, his wings are backlit. They are beating, delicate, cruciform, hollow feather, hollow bone. In the blizzard his furor is the only color, the only shape. He is waiting for the coward to come out. There is nothing all winter he has saved to eat. I saw a female the day before he disappeared. Her beak just as orange, her body, calm, watched his. I made voices for her: variations on the pride and hemmed patience of women I’d known whose husbands did insistent, strong, and strange things. Maybe she knew it was spring. I didn’t. The next day he came once to throw the bright dime of his life to the walled world, as if to make sure it was not feather against feather that hurt him.
Copyright © 2017 by Leah Naomi Green. Originally published in Pleiades, Summer 2017. Used with permission of the author.