McLeod Logue

An Undue Burned

My key turned like maple syrup, the door stuck
nudged dipped molasses. She was startled

when I twitched even an inch, perched in the front corner
of the porch canopy, collecting tiny trinkets to raise her young.

She’d built a word in the soft wood, a blur of brown
any time I cracked the door, she fled to watch a stone throw away.

We were at odds, me and the mother, both needing
to enter the world, to taste the sun, her in constant motion,

motherhood meant staying alive. I could feel it
coming, her anxious escape, followed by four shallow clicks,

like a flicked switch from heaven. I heard them slice
through air and then nothing. The eggs collided with the ground

in harmony, A tiny beak lay dormant on the pavement,
still shelled in blue. On the other side of the door I let fat tears

come dripping down my cheeks like diamonds. I heard her,
the mother, crying in melody, as if a lifetime of catch

and release had only ever prepared her for this. Grief
stretched its wire through the door and her song echoed

in the cavity of my stomach. A grief that I could wake up from,
and she would always carry, the weight of her broken nest,

a nest we broke, falling beneath her feet, an anchor tethered
to a grave. I prayed for rain to wash away the blue egg shells,

and when it did,
it rained for days.

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McLeod Logue is a creative writing MFA candidate and poet at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, her work is influenced by her family’s fine art, southern roots and attachment to location. McLeod's work has appeared in The Nashville Review, Passenger's Journal and is forthcoming elsewhere.