Good Poetry
The Squawk
Chloe Lind
We begin in birdcall.
Not metaphor yet, only
twitchy tongues, glass-threaded syllables.
Daybreak made our throats slick
with inherited static,
a half-remembered grammar of
flinch/fight/flight.
​
We speak in tremor,
peck at past pecking orders.
Our words snag on barbed wire:
early bird memory,
a feathered dialect gasping
between mercy and molt.
Even now, the body forgets
how to name its hunger.
​
Child-chirping has always
been a tonal language.
We linger between roosting and sleep.
​
Mother was the nest.
Spine bent to its hollow.
Hair threaded with lint & longing.
She made shelter
out of her own undoing.
A home is clipped and skyless,
and we call it warm.
​
Once, she hummed a seed into us.
Once, we answered in tantrum & awe.
A seed for a seed in birdspeak,
a mouth for a mouth.
​
She yanked the inevitability
of wings out of us,
that impossible arc,
an infinity blooming from our plumage.
​
Still, she stayed,
not out of faith, but fatigue.
Wings whittled to nubs by
the hunger to hurt,
the horror of restraint.
​
Habit hums softer.
​
We learned to circle above her.
Our wings lit with electric nausea,
smoke caught in the throat of inheritance.
Now her feathers line our lungs.
We cough her song in confession.
Flight is the only inheritance we tuck
under our winged ribs.
​
We are a dialect of distant sky.
​
We finish in birdsong.
Not metaphor,
but muscle:
A throat remembering the squawk.
A body remembering air.