Alston Tyer

Heraldic

In the year that followed
our family’s last cohesive
move, we sat together in
a wooden amphitheater
and watched a demonstration
on the feats of birds of prey.
The falconer, sweating through
his leather jerkin in
Early Summer, Tennessee,
introduced to us his charge,
though the bird’s name
is lost to us now. 

We watched the falcon unfurl
over our heads, due west,
saw it fail to turn when signaled
by its handler’s terse, dense whistle.
The bird, to our eyes, shrank
in the sky and disappeared,
as if it found a sliver,
a pale crack in the depths
of the air and wedged itself through,
as if it not only ceased
to exist, but had, to us,
never existed at all.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Alston Tyer is a poetry candidate at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She was a contributing poet at the 2022 Sewanee Writers’ Conference and her work has been nominated for the AWP Intro Journal Awards. She currently lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.