Birds of the Midwest
The July I was fifteen, weekdays, after my dad left for work,
Mom and I would don bright blouses to go visit his father,
my only remaining grandparent, at St. Luke’s Hospital,
about a two mile, ten-minute drive.
On the way we might stop for a dollar’s worth of gas,
and Shorty would pump it, waving his lit cigarette
as he jabbered, I bracing for an explosion as my mom
nodded and murmured in a way he clearly interpreted
as encouraging. Once I sighed, audibly, and he ducked
his head saying, Well, I’ll let you go.” My mother
scolded me as we pulled away and quit
taking me there, but I figured I did her a solid,
quite possibly saving both our lives.
The nurses annoyed me by referring to my grandpa as my mother’s
father. In-law, I would add under my breath. In-law, they would repeat,
condescendingly, pursing lips and rolling eyes.
But someone had to stick up for her, give her credit.
After the visit, before I would take off to flirt and gossip at the public pool,
we usually had lunch at the coffee shop across the street from the hospital.
One day I became distraught that the fried chicken I had ordered tasted
both familiar and yet wrong and I imagined it was turkey,
what I thought turkey would taste like fried, so tough, dry
and flavorless I couldn’t finish it. “Well, just don’t order
it again,” said my mom, polite as ever.
One rainy Saturday, my parents went together to the hospital
and must have let in the robin I watched careen off the walls
of our tiny house. Our three cats watched too, and it saw them.
I knew there was a way to take a towel and shoo it out,
but I was outnumbered. Overwhelmed, I retreated, defeated
into my walk-in closet of a bedroom, closed the door
and nestled to sleep immediately, waking a couple hours
later when my parents returned. I emerged, cotton-
mouthed and groggy, shaking my head,
asking, Where’s the bird? What bird? A robin
got in… Are you sure you didn’t dream it? Yes—the cats
went crazy. We found something on the floor
by the cats’ dish that looked like a yellow beak.
But where were the feathers, the bones, the blood?
My mother’s father-in-law survived and went home to his mansion.
A few years later, when I was in college, my parents sold our tiny house
to move in to care for him. Thanksgiving break we walked through our empty nest,
footfalls echoing, and I started to cry. Did you ever find any more remains
of that bird? Never.
Another Thanksgiving, my mother ten years gone,
a friend deep-fried a turkey. Like gas pump-adjacent arm-waving,
smoke breaks, a dangerous undertaking; had to be done outside;
could it possibly be worth it? It sounded gross. I braced. Its taste
exploded like nothing like I had imagined, so juicy and delicious
I wanted to consume it entirely, to leave no trace,
make my red blood and wishbone, my flightless feathers
become so light and unassuming as to rise and rise and rise.