MAYBE IT WAS NEW MEXICO Jay Thompson

The kingfishers—or whatever they were, plump soft Swiffer-colored birds with orange beaks and iridescent purple and green-tipped wings—were being hunted by the penniless merchants (practically beggars now) who’d followed them here, from the plains highway down to the river. The merchants with us at the rest area carried darts, and bindles hung with the birds’ downy skins: each the size of a slug and worth a dollar, enough to sew a slipper or a lady’s glove. The river (out the back window of the rest area’s cottage, I could see it) divided endless red plains of sand, so it might have been New Mexico. My brother and I hid in the cottage’s back room while our parents fought, my mother pleading, then furious, screaming, out front. Our four bikes were propped against the cottage wall. My skin was sandy and smelled like coconut lotion. The shade was as hard as the wall. 

My brother just repeated I want to go home. In a huge, vacant side room—layered with red Persian rugs—I found a wooden cage, mattress-size and broken open, and a bird hiding in the corner. I knew the cage, before it broke, had been full of birds to be killed and skinned, and I knew this bird would be killed and skinned in the cottage. I screamed for my brother to prop open the living room’s bay window, then scooped the bird into my hands. It felt like dandelion fluff or a plush heart. I could feel its live quiver. It seemed wrong to carry the bird out any way but in the cage, but the bird, as soon as I put it in, slipped through the split bar. I caught it out of the air, lost it, followed to the dresser it hid behind, and groped, swearing, until I caught it again: it was hot and white, pecking and scratching. I left the big broken cage on its side on the floor, and, cupping the bird fast, carried it to the open bay window. 

My brother sat on the floor, and didn’t look up; I set the bird loose. It shot into air, then soared into a bank of long riverside reeds. The dozen other birds—its fellows, from here all tiny—waited there in the reeds, who must have fled the broken cage. I could see it, standing on a blade of grass, while it pantomimed its captivity; pantomimed my entrance, as a hulking claw-mitted threat shadow, a changer; pantomimed its freedom, wild-witless; pantomimed ingratitude. Animal ingratitude! Watching it was happy: leaning out the window, I felt a melting start.

 

PURGATORY

striding over dogshit coils silver

cottonwood fluff mown corn stub 

what I own I derange

I woke up so much worse

 

a moth meant my journey

I couldn’t make out my  

brittle itineraries the coffee burned

my dogwood dropped its flower-like leaves 

oh plenty of strangers speak

solemnly to me already thanks 

keens the starling who looks

so grateful from this distance

 

PURGATORY

when it rains I’ll make us soup 

you call my living an empty stretch

wildflowers painted on a sheet around the gas cans 

a voice repeats back to itself

beaten planetary yellow paper lamps  

butt your head and jostle your brew

tough is whatever’s around me that’s not my heart 

water trims the cornfield

your old cat is dinner-shy in front of us 

I want it to rain so I can make soup 

I am the harbor rain ignorantly enters

I’m trying to not overwater your orchid in its burrow of gourmet bark