I pushed out a baby bird with a broken ribcage and wings that were
another pair of legs, complete with claws. It didn’t breathe
at all this turkey vulture, though I loved it for all its
deformities. I loved it because it would never know the joy of
flight —even if my birth canal hadn’t crushed its wispy
bones. Because everyone had bought me strollers and diapers and
socks that didn’t match, I felt I had disappointed them with
a stillbirth. A stillbirth of a turkey vulture, whose second pair
of legs we splayed and nailed to our barn doors as if that would
say this whole fiasco was a joke. But it wasn’t. When I held
that turkey vulture, stiff as though it had been dead for months,
the afterbirth stuck in its feathers, I picked its molting down and
knew such a song couldn’t be sung with a hammer and
nail.
I pushed out a baby bird with a broken ribcage and wings that
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May 9, 2014 4:07pm
