Wing Poem

What was I reading that compared a woman’s shoulders to birds? The narrator said he wanted to pluck the bones, suck them dry–was it Lolita?

Well, your back is like that, but not separate, not squabs,

More a wide wing expanse, a cliché human angeling—

Regardless, I too would like that, to dismantle your flight mechanism,

            Leave you featherless, goosepimpled and cold.

 

You’re not a woman, but you’re halfway there–& anyway birds don’t create flight, they only utilize existing air currents,

Riding the hot breath of an earth so unlike this day,

Whose temperate, damp, northwesterly charade

Would scoop you into some circular whirlwind, a headfirst dive

A cordial handshake and an unmaking of love.

 

There’s no such thing as unplummeting, but can we peel these layers off it anyway, eat the plum out of it anyway; can we

Be unmet, unprecipice ourselves,

Precipitate an undoing?

Funny how there’s a hardness in falling,

A softness in the word down .

---

KB Wren is a graduate of the MFA program in fiction at Cornell University.