Taylor Byas
Birdwatching at Railroad Park
—after Plate 106 Black Vulture or Carrion Crow by James Audubon, 1831
A vulture loafs a lazy halo
over my head, charting a circle
around my bench as its frost-white wing
tips thresh the air like a paddle-fan.
It ziplines down to concrete, smooth
as a fold-by-numbers paper glider,
docks in the middle of the street
and eyes a dismembered bird, half-dead.
It tangoes, one claw in front of the other—
it’s ruff deranged and spiked—and struts
across the even yellow dashes
of the street, prepares to take a bite.
Instead, the vulture eyes me, cowers
down to the pavement, wraps its wings
around the thing as if to check
for warmth or squawk a lullaby,
mirrors the birds in Audubon’s plate,
hugging their prey like scarves in winter.
The vulture and prey become one bulge
of feather and muscle breathing in
the intersection, until the vulture
raises its head, a chunk of meat
and bone between its beak, perhaps
to say, Well what did you expect?
If I Stay, or A Black Girl’s Future in Rural Alabama
The back porch netting
transforms me into some
scaly thing while
the August heat irons
me flat into the metal glider.
Mosquito bites
unlevel my damp skin.
In the silence left
by my own body’s betrayal,
the dog at my feet streaks
the house’s screen door
with nose-wet pollen. Inside,
the nursery unfinished,
half-painted, uneven streaks
stopping halfway up
the wall like the top of a picket
fence; the fume of baby blue
buckets through the house.
Out here, over the sound of
your truck tires pressing
into gravel, the soft wail
of the swing cries
faulty,
defective.
Taylor Byas is the author of two chapbooks, Bloodwarm (Variant Lit) and Shutter (Madhouse Press), as well as the forthcoming full-length collection I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times (Softskull Press 2023).