Mary McSharry

Biology Lesson: Flight

Fourth grade field trip, bio professor brought us down a hall
that smelled like month-old dissection 

to a room filled with tiny bird-bones in smudgy cases, body-relics
with the life scooped right out of them, reconstructed with pins 

and special glue that dries glass-hard. One model had a little motor
underneath, a metal rod attached to the spine, and when you hit a switch— 

it flew! Bones clacked and whirred, and with all the muscles unhinged,
peeled away, the motion didn’t look bird anymore, instead 

mammalian, almost human—looked like something
I’d seen a different body do. Professor said, We’ve found 

it’s really more like swimming, and I thought of Olympians
sliding through industrial-blue pools, the clear they’re coated with 

when their weight pushes the water-surface up—egg-white thick; mouths
cracked like geodes, unsuctioning from wet pull—dry need;

like nestlings—eyes closed, beaks spread—transforming
heat to noise; babies, when they turn so red it’s like the cry 

comes out of their skin. Because to propel a land-bound, land-made form
through water, or air, is work—the kind it takes to eat and breathe;

energy like we used to speed
down the highway back to school, the children flying;

and out the bus window, the Olympic birds in the air,
their feet pushing away at the liquid sky.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Mary McSharry is a PhD student studying anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. She is from South Carolina.