Sparrows had nothing else to do and were born to do it:
Hold up sky with stone pierced through foreheads
like spazzed-out jewels; swelling down on every marred
carcass left to ooze out a city of function, blood cell
after blood cell narrowed in the dirt.                Yes
it’s a sign of devotion-- could it afford to be
anything else, flat rinds of years burrowed
beneath ships?        How the scene must’ve looked!
Maybe torrential creatures-- head of sparrow, body
of deer-- arched down pure and purposeful to shoot
azure life all over those ships. The mast, the fray,
the deck-- all of them, all of it green, shocked trees
wound around the beach like tumbled beads. Maybe I
was there in a pink waistcoat sabotaging chapped lips
with salt, ribs restrained artfully in silk.    Maybe
pinch of chastity, a bird slid in after bedtime, her hoof\
mean and perfect in its giving, immersion of feather
in tissue our complicit pact in seduction.    Maybe
if I wait long enough all the Frankenstein, gut-ripped
myths will walk into my bedroom with bows ‘round
their waists. In a wet fit of hunger I’d slit my head off
right quick and exchange it for one of theirs;
this tacit barter economy, this gift.

Gina Abelkop lives in New York, where she edits the feminist literary and arts journal Finery. Her poems have previously appeared in Diagram, Hothouse, Lodestar Quarterly, and Stirring, among others. www.birdsoflace.com