The day I grew feathers
was the day I told my mother
that I would not give her grandchildren.
There have been many times
I spooned hope onto her tongue
a flavor I am enough familiar with
to regret having given her a taste.
Hope is a sticky thing, like gum on your shoe
kissing the sidewalk still there
every time you move forward. My mother’s hope
was a choke vine with spiral tendrils
those long green fingers that bite into
a body that could have lived
had it not been wrapped up
in the embrace of something so unforgiving.
I died that day, like the oak in our backyard
all coated in ivy and suffocating
each crisping leaf a cry: I’m dying
unheard amidst the screaming emerald green.
Its hulking carcass still stands sentinel behind our house
because dead doesn’t always mean gone
or never means gone. And anyways
the feathers were red and brown and unremarkable.
If I had told my mother about them, she might have suggested
I pluck them and my eyebrows, while I’m at it
would have promised me, as any good mother would
that there are times when a bird is not
a bird. I found myself, instead
convinced that I had spent too many hours
shaving coarse dark hairs from my delicate woman’s chin
and perhaps feathers could be
beautiful and I could not be
questioned. If I told no one