Becoming Birds
Tara Marie Gilbert-Brever
She folds herself in forests
at nightfall; waiting, unwinged
for her flight. The sky is not hers.
Her face is the bark of birches, peeling
with indifference. Her teeth belong to the
bones beneath others’ skin, mottled and frowned.
She brings bags that cannot be pried-
undercircling her eyes,
sagging solid legs, bowing
the bare branches of her arms.
She has become too heavy
upon her lungs.
She caves near the pond of falling oriole
eggs; they slip from their tree-
sacks, break the water’s face, hatch
with the frogs, limbless. Her feet find
the split shells, shiver on their whites, eat
them with the small mouths her between toes.
She sings now through the exit
of leaves, within the eggs, starlike,
sinking into dark water,
amidst the sodden chicks, thickened
in their tracks, behind the favored birds’
sun-path which she cannot climb.
