A Dead Bird

A dead bird with stuck-together feathers

Dusty claws on scaly black legs clutching at the air

This dead bird weighing almost nothing

Rotted on the side where she’d been laying

A dead bird with her broken beak askew

Oddly not easily fleeing at a dog’s snuffling approach

Her eye open but glazed and empty of all its living luster

This dead bird in a grocery bag gliding toward a dumpster

A dead bird that children still cannot ever touch

Feathers no longer iridescent when pressed into the earth

The crows came quickly and spoke over top her broken body

This dead bird whose calls no one could remember

A dead bird lying down in the grass unlike any others

Surrounded by a loss of feathers amidst her snow-like down

This dead bird with a silent mate perched in some nearby tree

Lets the cold fall rain drench right through her tiny bones

A dead bird smudged and dirty like she never was before

Wing cocked up, down there in that little ditch

Floating with the runoff draining from the road

This dead bird that I see again as I lay close to sleeping