Fledgling

Traci Brimhall

I scare away rabbits stripping the strawberries

in the garden, ripened ovaries reddening

their mouths. You take down the hanging basket

and show it to our son—a nest, secret as a heart,

throbbing between flowers. Look, but don’t touch,

you instruct our son who has already begun

to reach for the black globes of a new bird’s eyes,

wanting to touch the world. To know it.

Disappointed, you say: Common house finch,

as if even banal miracles aren’t still pink

and blind and heaving with life. When the cat

your ex-wife gave you died, I was grateful.

I’d never seen a man grieve like that

for an animal. I held you like a victory,

embarrassed and relieved that this was how

you loved. To the bone of you. To the meat.

And we want the stricken pleasure of intimacy,

so we risk it. We do. Every day we take down

the basket and prove it to our son. Just look

at its rawness, its tenderness, it’s almost flying.

Aubade on a Ghost Hunt

We prefer to do it with the lights on,
the Victrola scratching How long can it last?
against the tremble of curtains. Patient,
we learn the walls, their glossary of knocks,
translating harlequin and dust. What we
know lives here—lonely bone star blossom
of the spider plant, lost bee on the sill,

Traci Brimhall

2021

Rapture: Lucus

Posters for the missing kapok tree appear on streetlights
offering a reward for its safe return. I hate to spoil it,

but the end of every biography is death. The end of a city
in the rainforest is a legend and a lost expedition. The end

of mythology is forgetfulness, placing gifts in the hole
where the worshipped tree should be. But my memory

lengthens with each ending. I know where to find the lost
mines of Muribeca and how to cross the Pacific on a raft

Traci Brimhall

2014

The Last Known Sighting of the Mapinguari

Before she died, my mother told me
I’d make the monster that would kill me,
so I knew this was someone else’s death
creeping into my field, butchering my cow.
I recognized its lone eye and two mouths.
Perhaps it mistook the lowing for the call
of its own kind. I didn’t mind the heifer—
she’d been sick for weeks, her death a mercy—
but her calf circled, refusing to leave even
as the creature pulled out its mother’s tongue,
fed one of its mouths and moaned from the other.
The intestines glowed dully in the moonlight.

Traci Brimhall

2013

Poems

Fledgling

More by this poet

Aubade on a Ghost Hunt

Rapture: Lucus

The Last Known Sighting of the Mapinguari

Poems

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Fledgling

More by this poet

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