She was pecking cornmeal on the table.
He said don’t touch her, the smell of your hand will cling to the wings, then no one
will touch her. We watched from the verandah the way she rustled in the yard than howled
like a cat locked in the laundry room.
I think that’s her whistle said Dad.
The laundry room is also a nursery for baby clams-- we counted them and found nothing but sand in their soft parts.
We tried to feed them to her, but Mother Birds do not eat clams. Instead
she takes tufts of our hair to fold into a nest in the kitchen, a shrine of bike helmets and science fair posters. Mother
sits on the rubble until she’s all of it: the bottom half meets her top half and a she’s a twister board that no one plays.
The pile is an ice dispenser and an emerald. Somewhere is her metal eye.
We do not touch her.
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