* * *
Bontems Bird
did you also find those thin coral strands
lashed into your skin at twilight
having hurled yourself heedless through cornfields,
__________________________________________________________canebrakes?
do you also remember the pluck of blackberries,
honeysuckle? did you mount the windbreak, dive creeks,
call song like rivers from the sky?
or had you always been ornamental,
ormolu, voiced by ingenious device
void of all desire but to gleam
presentably on an end-table? mother,
i know the window’s false sky,
the gasping pavement, head twisted back,
bones filling with mercury,
and jagged wheels displacing flesh
to spin, and mesh, and pipes to sing
and swivel joints to turn my head
to silver thought and metal wing
to be a gleaming, splendid sight
a gilded, lilting, pretty thing
with feathers made for less than flight / /
_____________________________.than flight / /
____________________________._than flight / /
_________________________________.a flywheel slips,
________a mainspring wound too tight,
ask mercy from the fingertips
of any scrutinizing wright
whose whitened teeth and diagrams
will spread my bones along the page
in faint lament / /
________.lament / /
________.lament / /
____the mechanism jams
._.i beat against the cage
although it’s clear where i belong,
a trinket of a golden age
my only wish to be improved,
for each ambitious, wild, and wrong
potential choice to be removed / /
________________________removed / /
________________________removed / /
____________________my mother’s voice
_______________my wired mouth
our pretty, prerecorded song.
* * *
Calypso Jane Selwyn (she/her) is a transgender lesbian poet living in Fayetteville, AR. She has been published in Gingerbread House, and is a reader and facilitator for TWANG Anthology, which seeks to showcase Southern and Midwestern transgender and gender-non-conforming artists and writers. Her Halloween playlist is better than yours.
