My Baby Bird by Tiffany Lin
A baby bird once came by
with a bloody wing, with a solemn sad chirp,
and when watching me, a spark in her beady eye.
She perched, and purred, and cried
in my looming home, now made our own.
Her back turns at my leave,
with a scoff at my faux pride.
I dwell wrong if not hers, alone.
She prances joyfully into my bed,
feathering my clothes, pecking at my breast.
In my life, now made her own,
springs a guilt of my wormless mouth,
resolve cracking lower than my backbone,
a weed sprouts in the split—
we are wildered, frail and alone.
Love distorts her a ravenous harpy,
gasping for the prophecy
of my blood across soiled sheets;
she is hungry.
Time and time I set my baby bird off
to the trees with her chicks, to safety’s allure,
leaving beastly me pleading
for my brutish peace of mind.
Singing still sweetly with the gaze of a vulture,
she flutters back, cruel emblem of Zeus,
to bury her cursed beak in my liver—
I am ripped and cracked, and now made her own,
tightly bound by rusted chains, a woman of no use
but to feel the caress of a feather upon my burnt cheek.
The beat of eager wings unsettles me from the horizon,
words ringing untrue, their presence everlasting,
I learn she has never left,
but still lingers in my labyrinth.
Down the hall echoes her wretchedly beating cough,
perhaps a laugh that has lost its joy.
Around the edge awaits a pair of eyes too soft to refuse.
My arms spread, welcome to this sordid, shrouded theft.
Here I dangle, a ripened red bite,
from the beak of my baby bird, my precious plume of blue.
Tiffany Lin is a junior from Sylva, North Carolina. She is mixed American Taiwanese and reads and writes in her free time.