The Poem I Couldn't Bring Myself to Name

She clutched grey pigeon eggs between her ivory teeth,
It was a curious balancing act that smelled of lion jaws and sunflower seeds,
Her eyes held the volume of a gravedigger digging his first grave,
they were sullen like whale bones sucked up upon the shore,
and acid-yellow.
A soulful tear seared out of the temple-corner of each eye,
making a V-shape down her face like a following of birds filing home;
it reminded her of the first time she heard jazz,
that the world was so lonely
that we had to invent beautiful things to fill it with.
Her jaw rattled like an open window falling shut during an earthquake,
some spindly acrobat had broke a leg and been dragged and left in some lonesome corner;
All the while worry had been spread thin and hardened across her body
like a cheesecake glaze,
her facial muscles like wet clothes pinned up under her eyes.
She couldn't crush them.
Her mind too fluttery with the thought of their bird-mother squawking
like some acrobat in a lonesome corner,
She felt like some callow wailing stranger picking up an orphaned bleeding baby during the apocalypse,
out of moral obligation to all that is innocent and pure.
So she didn't crush them.
She swallowed them, one by one, like counting fingers on a newborn,
she carried the acrobat on her back,
and found the pigeon mother in some lonesome corner, listening to jazz.
And, with a short blade, she carved a half moon across her belly like a Japanese disembowlment ritual,
and tugging the rubbery sac from plunged tissue,
she delivered them, warm and bloody
and to their mother.
-anna sluder

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