* * *
I’m sorry that they thought you were ugly but
if it makes you feel any better they thought I was ugly too, and
when I first saw you I thought you were oh so beautiful the way you
dove down the knotted oak tree, with the
orange and brown and gold of your feathers glistening against
the wood and the gunmetal of November skies,
you were ripping into rabbit flesh like they tore open their
Doritos bags with their teeth except instead of
monosodium glutamate and red dye number five
spilling from your mouth were
cottontails and strands of sinew and inside
all the snot-nosed kids pressed their faces against the glass to see you,
sneered and scrunched up their eyes and stepped back and
said to me that’s fucking disgusting, but
when I saw the meaty ropes of innards dangling from your beak and
the gleam in your eyes I knew that
you did not carry the mark of cruelty they thought you did,
when you tilted back your head and screamed you screamed
power and magnitude and don’t fucking push me down the stairs again
Sophie or I’ll push you down myself and
when the bell chimed after class to release the floodgates of
children I ran outside to the courtyard to
find you but the only thing you left behind was the
dark patch that seeped into the grass and
stained the edges of my new white shoes
* * *
Julia Beecher is an emerging writer and a college student from Cambridge, Massachusetts. In kindergarten she dreamed of being a writer and filled notebooks with poems and short stories; not much has changed in that regard. Send her fan mail (or hate mail) on Twitter: @JuliaBeecher.
featured photo by Jefferson Delogo from Pexels
