| Poetry |
I must be nine or ten.
I’m with my parents.
We walk into the family room.
The unfamiliar blot on the rug
erupts into a flurry of wingbeats.
It flies so fast we can’t make it out—
finch, wren, or starling—
it must have flown in through the open patio doors.
My mother shrieks, waves her hands over her head.
“Go out and shut the door,” my father tells her.
I stay with him. I tell myself I’m not scared,
although I imagine a sharp beak burying itself
in my eye like an aerial hypodermic needle.
This frantic blur hurls itself against walls,
every instinct impelling it “out, out.”
Father closes the window-blinds and
opens wide the sliding glass doors.
Finally, with a miniature thunderclap, the bird
flits outside and is lost against the blue.
Since then, I’ve erected my own walls:
job, wife, kids, cars, house, bills. . . .
Each day they close in tighter, cut off more air.
No one sees the bruises I’ve gained beating on them,
no one leaves an exit for my hasty, panicked flight.
By Scott Urban