Sally Rosen Kindred

Letter to the Inside-Bird

Old one, I feel you under the skin.
There’s a first brown bird in alone—

a sleepless inscape of feathers and ink,
a dance of barbs that makes night

sparrow through the ribs, smell like wet leaves and warnings.
There’s a dark lake east in me

where the keen comes in
gusting around your throat,

blackgolding the branches’ droop.
Alone? Waters whistling their stars. A call—

yours or mine? I can’t lie with your forgetting.
You twine through me

stems of wet starlight and ache:
stitch the blue air into flight

and ribbon me with wing-tracks, untellable
seeds. What can we mean 

when you roost in my shoulder,
shed a parched nest in the eaves? 

Soon-bird, I am graven with your shadows,
cold leavings, elegy’s shell-flakes and mud. 

I cradle your shade.
Bird in my head, don’t be a ghost:

Wing down along the spine
and sweeten the bark 

with the ash song I need.
Or haunt me hard 

below the birches, where my own bones long
for flight, and in the white yearn between

collar and hem
drifting from the high branch 

where I wait like lace
for your breath

to fill me.
Bird in my deep, in my womb now: flap black and near.

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Sally Rosen Kindred is the author of three poetry collections: No Eden (2011) and Book of Asters (2014), both from Mayapple Press, and Where the Wolf (Diode Editions, 2021), winner of the Diode Book Prize and the Jacar Press Julie Suk Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review Online, Plume, Pleiades, Shenandoah and New Ohio Review.