Bird’s Eye —
She puts on the yellow gloves
and waits for the starlings to leave.
From the kitchen exhaust she pulls
the cramped nest along with the newly hatched
and, wearing my father’s galoshes,
stomps everything into the sidewalk.
She tells me no pity, says they do not belong
here. Nor do I, eight, seeing this.
When the birds return they bring a plague
of small red bugs. We debate their name
while she cocks her head, holds
the can of poison in her gloved hand.
The dream comes later, and in it
we do not pick their feathers from the yard
when they begin to fall, when they begin
to heap softly in the corners of the fenced yard,
when they pile around the swing set,
the sandbox, the rhubarb. She says,
they carry disease, she says.
~ Amanda Warren
