Laura Maher
The night I watched the hawk rip apart a pigeon
in a second-story windowsill,
I was dressed as a bird. Red feather and flame,
men kept remarking, “You make a good bird lady.” Feathers drifted
into the street. In other words, there was a swift movement
followed by a slow movement. What I thought that night
was that the hawk looked at us but really
he looked beyond us.
Someone was taking a video recording on his phone.
Someone else gasped. A child was dancing and singing to herself in the street.
All those feathers falling. (What is that riddle
about a pound of feathers and a pound of bricks? The answer is that the mind
outweighs the body. All a body knows is the scrape of feathers swallowed.)
What I thought that night
was there is something to be said
about being taken. (Was the pigeon dead before it was devoured?)
That night I loved the hawk—its brindled feathers, its hollow bones,
eyes like black marbles.
That night I wasn’t sure if I could love anything that didn’t try to kill me.
That night other people’s bodies blocked all the wind.