after Brianna McCarthy
Sometimes, life decides to dangle you over the edge of something:
maybe a roof or a razor blade. Also truth: in every body, there is
a songbird, locked inside a cage of bone – and if the tarp is dark enough,
it will drop pitch into the silence of that shade, and it may
never rise again at the flirts of the sun. We don’t speak of this
much: don’t speak of weakness; flesh scars where we patch ourselves
together with time and concentrated grit. Ghosts spill from
our wounds, through our blood, which dries on the ground as
the petals of their funeral flowers. After the last calamity,
I had my mother take those petals in for a botanist’s inspection,
but he couldn’t finger the species of flora. He always came off
a bit pale to me – like there’s not a hint of color to his personality,
like he doesn’t have a rainbow emanating from the prism of his bone
marrow the way I do. Folks swear that’s impossible by some
definition, but they don’t know. They can’t understand this
feeling. What it’s like to hold the history of man inside you,
the secrets of existence, and yet be treated like yours ain’t worth
a feather, though perhaps that bird has already died of exhaustion
from singing inside a soundproof room – as I said, these walls haven’t
cried in years. They only seem to close in, collapse to ash, cloud.
Photo by Andrew Cohen
