[406 words]
The wind unspools a thousand birds taking flight.
A fierce frigate broadens her wings across the sky,
carrying the world on her back.
Flocks of magpies feast on pastrami a passerby left behind
and speak to me in my mother’s voice.
My heart beats at a hundred miles per hour.
My cotton shorts cling to me with my own moisture.
The wooden bench feels like a furnace.
I embrace the price of time and balance
a sketchpad on the edge of my sunburnt thighs.
Watercolors bloom on my white dress into a Rorschach
of primary color, dripping sap green and crimson
like popsicles from the shores of my childhood.
A breeze kicks up dirt into my hair and I discover
my eyes are the only parts of me still dry
from forgetting to blink. I follow an ibis’ white-faced path
as it focuses and fades, curves the pinkish-red bill
of its plaintive cry, its mortal dark wingtips until it is an ocean
of light in this labyrinth of alders and pines,
canary and cardinal calls. I watch a sparrow’s solitary evolution
ripen into a bark-brown-bodied experiment in living
transient as a toddler’s wish. Before me, a brook bubbles
with the never tiring tender toil of fish. Splinters of silver and gold
seem to double my way of seeing, my way of being
beside the echo of my mother, half-stirred out of sleep
in her silk nightgown. Curlers wind her blond
in cozy domesticity that reminds me of her burnt salmon croquettes
and brownie batter we licked straight off a beater.
Her velvet robe flutters
like infant eyelashes at the suddenness
of wind displacing leaves.
I look at the mask Parkinson’s resins
where her exaggerated expressions used to be.
Laugh lines that appeared long enough to reach her toes.
Crow’s feet marking minutes in grey at her hairline.
She wraps her arms around me.
I stay perfectly still. I cannot think.
We are under the elemental force of the catalpa full
of wings turning into the Milky Way, into time itself.
I drag my brush across sockets of permanent rose and scarlet lake,
try to do the moment, the fuss of goldenrod gizzards,
hatchling and hobbling, my mother, by my side
and before I was a cell her womb made,
the heron, the crow, every earth-bound creature I do not know
a justice. I bask in the rays of the bird refuge ablaze
with the readiness for life.
Grace Lynn is an emerging painter who lives with a chronic illness. Her work explores the intersections between faith, the natural world, art and the body. In her spare time, Grace enjoys listening to Bob Dylan, reading suspense novels and investigating absurd angles of art history.
