The bird in his hand. Four boys packed around a table
in a hot kitchen, sweat-stained t-shirts and tank tops. A clock
on the wall, the smell of sauerkraut. Sweat. Wheel of Fortune
on the TV, a lucky strike, a whirl. It was nearing dinnertime:
their stomachs empty but full of the mud from which we all
came. One whispers what should we name it as if it came in
through the open sliding glass door nameless. It was in the air—
you could still smell the firecracker lit inside the drain of the sink.
Get out. I remember thinking. That boy, his thumb on the white
thing’s throat. It was a bird of snow, ransacked to that long Florida
summer. Forsaken. And now held. How dangerous it becomes to
be held in the hand of a newfound God. I remember thinking, sipping
my big red Kool Aid and standing in the cool of the open refrigerator
door: why don’t you fly thing? There is no use, it knows with closed
throat like a narrowing tunnel. The only escape is through the mouth.
~
Get out. The woman who rolled out of that powder blue Taurus that
one morning, the mist lifting off of I-270 like it was one long black
river or a single lung. Cradling her head in the grass. What prayer
must she have said to leave like that? Red martyr, leaving like a needle
passing through a hand. When the war ends remind me that every exit
is also an opening—a backward womb or messianic tongue spitting me
back out like a seed. All I ever wanted was a life I could dance to. & how
I thought of you red martyr, how I thought of you bird on a car ride down
the black river. Hotbox electric. Fry grease and blasted radio. Second coming.
Laughter. Another round, because we still young and got nothing to lose.
What should we name it the world holds you in its hands as if you weren’t already
named. As if you came nameless and not out of your mother headfirst. You
are lonely, you think. Maybe you have always been lonely. God holds his
thumb on your throat. How dangerous it is to be held, you think, with the
car window cracked. The night smells like rain and so the sky became the mouth
the gospel came from. Think of the man standing at the street corner with his guitar.
How a lonesome song can turn a man into anything, even a ghost. How when glass
breaks the only thing that truly changes is its ability to cut. & this is why at the
checkout line when I was six my mother puts both her hand s on my shoulders
and tells me to talk to the cashier. Speak child. Why? So we can eat & be full
of more than what the body allows, what we stomach, what song we refuse.
I want to be a poet I whisper into the wet night, an utterance, a refuge until it
became a guttural cry, a generational song, the tree from which I came crashing
into a sliding glass door. Until from my throat with two hands came a chorus of feathers.
Brendan Nurczyk is a poet and essayist from Jacksonville, FL. He is the
editor-in-chief of Elan Literary Magazine and reads for Farside Review. His
work has recognized by Lunch Ticket, Bennington College, and Princeton
University.